Hard Drive Crash And Data Recovery

Hearing a buzzing or clicking noise emanating from your PC? Screen reads: "Operating System Not Found?", or "Drive Not Found", or "Disk Read Error"? Have you encountered the evil "blue screen of death"? You could be experiencing a physical hard drive crash. Or, you could have simply just encountered some common operating system.

Starting out, take a look at the issue your computer is facing that may have created the hard drive crash. First of all, are their physical issues with your PC? Aside from very obvious physical issues, such as a system affected by disaster such as fire or flood, there are some things you should check.

Detecting The Danger Sounds

If your hard disk drive is emitting odd sounds such as clicking, scraping or grinding sounds, your best bet is to immediately turn your PC off. In most cases where actual noises are heard, this is critical, as your hard drive is likely damaging itself! Noises are typically symptomatic of protective hard drive head failure. If it is a physical problem like this, you may need hard disk drive recovery.

This can destroy the data on your hard drive, mainly because of the high rate of spin for most hard drives, which can range from 4,200 RPM for a newer laptop drive to 15,000 RPM+ for high end SCSI drives. When noises are being heard, the head can damage the actual hard disk platters very quickly. If you are experiencing a situation like this, contact us for a hard drive crash data recovery quote right away. It may be likely that you're working with a damaged hard drive, and may need to be serviced at our clean room.

Using Disk Utility Software

Currently, there are hundreds of data retrieval software products on the market, many of which are good, and many of which not so good. What you should understand about these products is that they are typically created for preventative maintenance, and not actual data recovery. These programs, often called Utilities, are fine for correcting minor day-to-day system problems, but in extreme cases of hard drive crash they frequently can actually cause more damage, and render data unrecoverable. Here are some of the most important things you should know when experiencing data loss:

In the end, your best bet is always to turn off your computer immediately, and contact a professional. Shutting down your computer prevents any further damage to both your hard drive and to the data it contains.

Saving An Undo File - A Critical Move With Utility Programs
Most disk utility programs worth their salt (avoid software with no "Undo" function altogether) will always ask you if you would like to save an "undo" file so that it can reverse any potential negative changes it may make to your hard drive.

Always ensure you click yes. In many cases, if your utility program does not prevent the damage to your data, an undo file will at least ensure that further damage is not caused. As well, by sending the undo file on a disk with your hard drive, we can better recover all of your data.

Data Recovery For Windows NT/2000/XP Server, Linux, Unix and NetWare

Attempting to recover data from systems based on professional level operating systems by yourself is not necessarily a good idea, no matter your particular level of expertise. Be warned especially about using disk utility programs for these particular systems, as they are expensive systems which should be treated with care. If you have hard disk problems with any of the OS flavors mentioned above, contact a professional first.