Hard Drive Recovery

With hard drives reaching well over a terabyte in their capacity, an incredible amount of data can be lost with a single malfunction. When important data is stored on a fragile medium like a hard drive, regular backups are a necessity. Unfortunately, backups are frequently neglected or out of date. To overcome this problem, an entire industry has appeared with hard drive recovery as its goal. This industry can be evenly divided into software recovery and hardware recovery. Software recovery involves the reversal of damage suffered due to a data corruption. Hardware recovery specializes in lifting data off of physically defective hard drives.

Luckily for users, software utilities like TestDisk can be used free of charge from home. TestDisk has been in development for many years as an effort of the open source community. As a result, TestDisk boasts a broad range of features that can help to overcome almost any software related problem. Common software malfunctions include corruptions in system files, or the loss of a partition table. The partition table is what the operating system uses to locate files upon request. When the table becomes corrupt, it renders the operating system helpless, unable to locate the files that it needs. When a system file suffers corruption, the entire operating system can behave strangely, or even stop working completely.

To find out whether a problem is software or hardware related, plug the malfunctioning drive into a still working computer. Install TestDisk or your choice of hard drive recovery program onto the computer, and run it against the malfunctioning volume. If the problem is software related, a program like TestDisk should be capable of identifying the issue and taking steps to correct it. This includes rebuilding faulty drive partitions and reversing the affects of data corruption.

Hardware failures are another source of common trouble. The most frequent kind of hardware failure involves the burning out of the read/write head. The read/write head spins around the disk at high speed, accessing magnetized data. If the motor that drives this device burns out, it can lead to the head dragging along the plate. This can cause permanent damage, so it is important that the system be powered down immediately if any odd scratching noises emanate from the drive.

Whenever hardware issues are at fault, services like DriveSavers may be the only option for hard drive recovery. Although expensive, these services may be the only hope of recovering data lost in a hardware malfunction. Although a drive may fail to spin up or operate at all, the data held on the disk can sometimes remain perfectly intact, albeit unreachable via the normal mode of operation. Hard drive recovery services like DriveSavers have special tools that are capable of reading data off of damaged drives.

Filed under: Hard Drive Recovery