Recover Data
Losing the data contained on a hard drive can be a devastating blow to any user. Vital documents and valuable belongings, such as music and movies, can be permanently lost. With hard drive sizes becoming larger every year, there is more to lose. Although hard drive speeds and size have ballooned over the years, reliability has not seen the same incredible growth. Hard drives are by their nature fragile mechanical devices, making them the weakest link in the computer chain. The hard drive is usually the first part to go in any machine.
When a hard drive fails, it is very possible to recover data still intact on the disk. Although panic is the initial reaction most people have when a hard drive fails, it is important to realize that there is still a decent chance to recover data from the disk. The odds of being able to recover data are even better when it is a simple accidental deletion, or even a partition failure. Even complete formatting of the drive can still result in recoverable data.
The worst kind of hard drive failure is one that is due to mechanical malfunction. When a hard drive breaks mechanically, the data on it cannot be recovered by any sort of software. In this case, the user must weigh the importance of the data against the cost of shipping the hard drive off to professionals. Services such as DrivseSaver typically charge over a thousand dollars. DriveSavers can restore even badly damaged hard drive data, but it isn’t cheap.
When a hard drive becomes unbootable, disconnect the drive and attach it to another computer. Let the main drive of the separate computer boot, and then attempt to browse through the bad drive. If the operating system cannot browse the drive, then run a utility such as TestDisk on the bad drive. If the problem is software related, then a utility like TestDisk should make it easy to recover data.
When it comes to an accidental file deletion, however, a wide range of free utilities has the capability to restore data. Undelete Plus is perhaps the most popular of these utilities. When this utility is run it displays a list of recently deleted items, as well as their condition and whether they can be restored. Most recently deleted files remain on the hard drive until they are overwritten. As long as the user acts promptly, accidentally deleted files should be recoverable.
Faulty drive partitions and even formatting may seem like a disaster, but many utilities available for free can correct these situations. When a drive partition is deleted, it usually means that the data it represented still exists, but the operating system can’t find it. With a free utility such as TestDisk, the user can recreate that partition, allowing the operating system to find the previously lost data. Even in the case of complete reformatting, a utility like TestDisk stands a good chance of being able to recover data.
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