Don't Panic! How to Recover Data From a Dead Hard Drive

If the components in your drive are still functioning, you can recover the data yourself. If there's mechanical damage, send it to the pros. PM's complete guide to getting your files back.

 

 

Let's dispense with the I-told-you-sos. If you find yourself facing a data recovery job, then you have probably forgotten the cardinal rule of computing: All hard drives eventually fail. And you didn't back up your data, did you? We've been there—hey, everybody has to learn this lesson once. Now what?

Panic!

Just kidding. Actually, the first thing to do is determine if it really is a hard-drive failure you're confronting, and not one of the countless other equipment glitches that can cause a boot failure. If you have access to another computer, remove the failed hard drive from your sick PC, and hook it up as a secondary drive to the alternate computer. The easiest way to do this is through a USB universal drive adapter—it costs about $30 and is a good device to have around for all sorts of hard-drive diagnostics.

On a Mac, the process is a bit simpler. Use a FireWire cable to hook your nonworking Mac to a working Mac, then, "target boot" the nonworking machine by holding down the T key as you power it on. With either method, it's possible that your failed hard drive will show up on your healthy computer and reveal its files, in which case your hard drive is probably fine, but your operating system needs to be reinstalled. (Don't forget to offload your files before you do that.)

An attempt to salvage your data can cost anywhere from a hundred dollars to several thousand

If your files don't show up on the secondary computer, then you are at one of those pivotal moments in life when you find out how much your hard work and treasured memories are really worth to you. Depending on how your drive is damaged, an attempt to salvage your data can cost anywhere from a hundred dollars to several thousand. What's more, the process can take days—and there is no guarantee that the money and time you invest will produce any results whatsoever.

Now that we've gone through the depressing task of properly setting your expectations, here's the good news: Very often, the data on failed drives is recoverable. In fact, it's surprising how resilient that information can be—just ask any corporate embezzler who thought he had deleted all the evidence from his PC, only to have it show up later in court. The comparison is apt, since the very same computer forensic tools that uncover digital misdeeds are the ones that can find your treasured family photos.

There are two ways that drives crash: Logical failure and mechanical failure. In a logical failure, the drive's components are physically undamaged, but because of either accidental formatting or a corrupt file system, the drive is not able to find and navigate its own data. However, unless it has been overwritten, that data still exists on your drive.

There are two ways that drives crash: Logical failure and mechanical failure

A mechanical failure means that your drive has broken parts that are preventing it from working—busted drives often make a telltale clicking sound as they futilely attempt to access their files. If you hear that, your data may still be there, but you're not getting it back without calling in the experts (see "Worst-Case Scenario," next page). And those experts make good money. Data recovery services from Kroll Ontrack, Seagate's i365 and Iomega charge between $500 and $2500 to attempt to salvage data from either logical or mechanical disasters, depending on the severity of the situation. But if you are just dealing with a logical failure, you can get your files back on your own for far less.

We recently attempted a data recovery from the crashed drive of a Popular Mechanics colleague whose 120 GB MacBook drive had spontaneously given up the ghost. We removed the drive from her laptop, then used our USB drive adapter to hook it up to a desktop computer for diagnosis. We didn't hear any sounds that indicated a truly dead drive, so our first step was to download the free demo diagnostic tool at Prosoft Engineering to check what might be salvageable. Many companies offer demos that will scan your drive and give you a pretty good idea of what's recoverable before you lay down money to buy their software.

Once the assessment indicated we'd get good results, we used Prosoft's Data Rescue II software ($99), which is tailored for the Mac OS and Mac-formatted drives. There are far more options for PC owners, including Prosoft's Data Rescue PC ($99), as well as Ontrack EasyRecovery DataRecovery ($199) and RecoverMyFiles ($60) from GetData.

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Most of these products work in a similar way. Install the software, select the defective drive as your source and choose a destination folder to receive the data. (Make sure your recovery drive has enough space for the contents of your failed drive.) Then be prepared to wait, and wait. A full scan and recovery of our 120 GB drive took four days, and a larger drive could take longer.

Recovering a hard drive is a bit like getting back a stolen car

Recovering a hard drive is a bit like getting back a stolen car—you'll be happy to have your files back, but the results could be messy. No data recovery program will return your files to you in exactly the condition you originally kept them. These programs are designed to essentially do a data dump from your problem drive to a new drive. Files will be organized by type (JPEG images will be in one folder, Word documents in some other folder, MPEG movies in another) and your songs and photos will be mixed with random sound and image files from your computer's system folder.

Additionally, the names of all your files will have been changed to various alphanumeric sequences, such as IMG1039.jpg or MOV2010.mov. So be prepared to settle in for a long weekend of sifting through and renaming your files. Oh, and while you're at it, now's a good time to buy that backup drive.

Drive Disasters: Worst-Case Scenario

What if your hard drive is suffering from something a bit worse than your everyday hard-drive crash? How much damage can your data take before it's gone forever? We wanted to find out what could be salvaged from a computer that had been through a natural disaster, so we simulated a really bad one. We decided upon an earthquake/flood doomsday scenario. First, we took two laptop drives, loaded them with test movie and music files, then beat the heck out of them until we heard the signature clicking of mechanical hard-drive failure. Then we submerged one of the drives in custom- made storm-surge floodwaters (salt water, construction debris, oil) and let it soak for four days.

We sent both hard drives to Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery, which sells data-rescue services to both corporate clients and consumers. Ontrack's Jeff Pederson analyzed the drives in the company's clean room and found that the read/write heads in our dry drive were bent from our abuse and that we had scratched the platters. Our flooded drive was wet, but the platters were undamaged. Pederson replaced the heads and performed a recovery.

The results? Pederson was able to save 99 percent of the data from the dry drive and 100 percent from the flooded drive. Had we been paying customers, the service would have cost us $1200 each.

Source : http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a3086/hard-drive-recovery/

Why Is It Not Possible To Easily Recover Data On A Hard Drive That Is Overwritten?

Many people may think that data are missing and a professional can still perform Raid data recovery or hard disk recovery. In reality, the data has not been removed. A computer hard drive does not know how to locate the data. The information, which tells your computer where to locate the data, is missing. This is also the reason why the best professionals who perform laptop data recovery or hard disk data recovery cannot locate important files after a drive has been reformatted. How do professionals find information to perform hard disk data recovery if you have not reformatted a drive and had it overwritten? These hard disk drives store information magnetically and do not require anyone monitoring the information on the drive. Those strings of data in eight 1's and 0's may look like gibberish, but a hard drive can use those 1's and 0's to keep stored data separate.

Hard drives use magnetism to store Information

Similar to a car battery, hard drives have magnets that have a plus and minus pole. The poles represent the binary code 1 and 0 is a computer uses. The hard disk storage unit or platter contains a ferromagnetic surface and divides the binary codes into magnetic regions, called magnetic domains. Data is stored by the direction of the magnetism of these domains. The magnetic domains are magnetised in one of two directions and represent a 1 or 0. Data is stored in two ways on a hard disk unit. Before 2005, this data was recorded parallel to the disk surface, meaning the binary code was either recorded with left or right magnetism. This type of recording was called longitudinal recording. Around 2005 and later, this magnetism used to record binary code has been used to record segments being recorded vertically and perpendicular; it is called perpendicular recording. It adds a layer to the recording process and the magnetic domains are stored closer together.

Why your computer cannot find your file and what happens when data is overwritten

You cannot find your file and sometimes, you take your computer into a professional who is skilled in laptop data recovery or hard disk recovery and they cannot find your files either. If your data has been overwritten, the best professional in the world, even if they are good at Raid data recovery, cannot help you. Your computer may not find data because it has written over the stored data. The files are located using a table on your computer and rather than delete the information in the file, your computer marks the space where the file is as vacant. By doing this, it is able to write over the existing data and this is why the best Raid data recovery specialist or hard disk recovery professional cannot retrieve your files. The operating system writes over old data with new data, essentially deleting it.

Laptop data recovery is a long shot after data is overwritten

 Your information may be recoverable if it has been overwritten. If data has been overwritten, the magnetic domains are changed through re-magnetization. The process is not reversible and it is slim recovering data because it would require the use of a magnetic force microscope.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Jake_Orton/1925285

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How to Recover All Your Data: A Few Efficient Approaches

How can you efficiently recover all your data when your desktop, laptop or tablet crashes or loses some of the data? Furthermore, databases, which are collections of interrelated data, are used rampantly by all organizations involved such as, hospitals, banks, travel agencies, hotels, shopping complexes and you name it! So what do you do when these databases with huge collections of important data suddenly get sabotaged? This article touches on these aspects, and gives you tips on data recoveries. So why don't you read on?

First of all, let's talk about your laptop, desktop or tablet that you use on a daily basis. The best ways to recover all the data on these machines when they crash without warning or say, lose part of the data due to some error happening is to keep a backup of all your data in flash drives which have a good many GB's of storage in varieties. Find out and then decide how many GB's of data from your machine and/or together with storage from other sources you need and then purchase that flash drive within that capacity or more and keep a backup of all your important data. You need to update your backup weekly preferably, if not daily. This will enable you to recover all your data on your computer by using the backups.

Let's say you have a huge collection of audio, photos, files in different formats and they are continually growing on your computer and you want to backup all of your data from Day 1 until today and also, you are not being able to keep all your data intact on your computer. In fact, you are dealing with terabytes (TB) of data and that means you need to backup all your data all along and also remove some of the old data from your computer to make some space for new ones. The best way to maintain data in this case is to use an external portable hard drive and backup everything in it. This kind of external hard drive can store several TB's of data and you get to choose which size is right for you.

If you do not deal with GB's and TB's of data but still need to backup your computer's data you can use rewritable CD-ROM disks which will be able to store a good many megabytes (MB's) of data. I guess you get the idea.

Now let us consider recovery approaches for databases used by organizations as I mentioned earlier.

Periodically, the entire database is copied (backed up), typically to tapes, compact disks, or external portable hard drives (which I described earlier). Backups also can be made incrementally i.e. only the changes since the last backup are stored. A log file is used to record the changes in the database at each update, typically the old and new values of the updated attribute(s).

When an error occurs:

If the database itself is damaged (media failure, e.g. by a head crash)

- The last backup is loaded

- The updates of all committed (completed) transactions that were executed since the time of last backup are shown by the log. Those transactions that had not committed yet need to be restarted.

If the database itself is not damaged, but the correctness of the contents cannot be guaranteed (e.g. because a program with updates crashed)

- The log is used for repeating committed changes (redo) and reversing non-committed changes (undo). Then, the non-committed transactions can be restarted.

Summing up, it always boils down to the fact that whether you are concerned with your computer's data or a database's data, you will need backups, plain and simple.

Rosina S Khan wrote this article in order to provide information on recovery approaches for data on your PC's and laptops and/or any organization's important data in large databases.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9234896

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Hard Drive Data Failure Recovery: Three Key User Mistakes

Hard Drive Failure Data Recovery: Three Key User Mistakes

Believe it or not, if you find yourself with a damaged hard drive and you fear that your data could be all but lost, don't worry: this is a lot more common of a circumstance than you might think.

Yes, everybody has critical files that they just won't be able to operate without: that key report that your boss needed from you yesterday, those important accounting files that mean the difference between an IRS audit and clear sailing, or maybe just those family photos that are so important to you. I don't think we have to talk about the important e-mails, your event calendar or all of the many other things that are currently stored on your now failed hard drive. But there is no need to worry, because hard drive failure recovery is always available.

But if there is a place you do not want to be, is in the shoes of a person who attempts to recover their failed hard drive on their own. What this can do is take a minor hard drive failure and turning into a really expensive problem. Here are three common mistakes that users frequently make when their hard drive crashes; mistakes that you should avoid if you want to get your data back.

1. Relying On Un-trusted Data Recovery Software

We all are subject to this: whenever we have any kind of problem in our life, our first move is always to go to Google and see we can find a solution to that problem. The issue with this when you have had a hard drive crash is that often the search results you will get will direct you to data recovery software companies. And while certainly there are a lot of good data recovery software products on the market, the unfortunate truth is that there are a lot more bad products out there that can actually damage your hard drive when it has already physically failed.

The most important point is that even if you do manage to luck into downloading the best data recovery software product available, there is very little you can do if your hard drive has physically failed. In fact, a lot of people end up damaging the critical data on their hard drive just simply by attempting to install these products.

And one more thing to consider: if your operating system cannot actually access your failed hard drive, how exactly are you expecting a software product that works with your operating system to access the same data? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Save yourself a lot of money and just avoid these products altogether.

2. Computer Repair Help

Calling for help is definitely not a negative. In fact, if you actually have a physically crashed hard disk, the best thing to do is call a professional data recovery service right away.

The unfortunate thing, however, is that most people do not actually contact a professional hard drive data recovery company. Instead, they call their local computer repair company. The problem with this is that computer repair and hard drive data recovery are hugely different services.

An important thing to remember is that taking a failed or physically crashed hard disk drive to a computer repair shop is akin to taking a space shuttle to the local mechanic. Underqualified is the word of the day here, and although they may tell you they can do something, and may charge you a lot of money, there is very little that they can do in-house.

It's probably best said that if you have a damaged hard disk drive that requires physical hard drive data recovery, it is better to deal with an expert in the field. This means dealing with a company that has a data recovery clean room, and a wide variety of experience recovering drives from all manufacturers. Basically, we're talking about a company that dedicates itself to data recovery.

One more thing about computer repair shops: a lot of them actually will claim to offer physical disk recovery, when in fact they do not actually provide it at all. Instead, what they will frequently do is take your hard drive and then outsource all of the repair work to a professional company.

The result of this will mean that not only will you pay 10 to 30% more for your data recovery service, but it will also take typically up to a week or two longer than if you just dealt with a data recovery company directly. Basically, computer repair shops can be very expensive middleman, and there is no reason why they should ever be involved.

3. Video Killed the Hard Drive

Everyone loves YouTube. Where else can you learn to rebuild your carburetor while watching an old episode of Dukes of Hazzard? We all love to do things ourselves these days, and YouTube provides a lot of incredibly good instructional video. So if you decide that you would like to install your own sprinkler system, or figure out how to master origami, this is a great place to look. But remember that with these example activities, there is very little at risk for you. Personal pride, yes, but in the end if you fail at these endeavors, you're probably going to be fine.

This is not going to be the case with hard drive failure recovery. And although you can probably find a lot of video claiming to show you how to professionally repair your broken hard drive, you may want to avoid these particularly dangerous videos.

Learning Is Good, Risk Is Bad

This is not to say that learning is a bad thing when it comes to hard drive repair. It certainly is not. But one of the things that you have to remain with data recovery is that the company that are involved in this industry professionally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars training their technicians, and hundreds of thousands of dollars more on specialized equipment.

If this specialized equipment was not necessary in order to properly recover hard drives, why would they have spent all that money?

Remember also that if you follow the advice of one of these "self-repair" videos, you may actually damage your hard drive so that the data contained on it simply cannot be recovered, professional or not. At that point, ask yourself who is to blame. Is it the video maker? And if so, what do you do about it? Sue?
The end result is that your important data is now unrecoverable because of the fact that you followed some bad advice. There is definitely quite a lot of bad advice on the Internet, and certainly when it comes to precisely constructed instruments such as hard drives, you are going to be better off avoiding it.

It's basically a fact that do-it-yourself hard drive data recovery in cases of physical disk failure is not a good route to take. It is basically a huge gamble with your data, data that you are probably are serious about getting back.So remem ber that it is always going to be possible to recover your data, but calling on an expert first is by far your best move. There really is no need to make the same mistakes that so many people continue to make.

It's always better to be safe when it comes to hard drive failure if you truly value the data on your hard disk. Be sure to check out http://www.harddriverecovery.org for a lot of more professional tips on how to recover hard drive systems that have crashed.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Maureen_Davies


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Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery - Recover deleted files and corrupt

Laptop Hard Drive Data Recovery - Recover deleted files and corrupt

Portable hard drive recovery services data - the advancement of technology has led to increased use of laptops. A laptop allows an individual or a business professional to perform his office with him and allows him to work and stay in business, even when not at home or in the workplace. Therefore, it is obvious that a laptop will always be stored with critical business and official information. But it would be pretty impressive if your important data is lost from the laptop and at the same time you do not have a backup of important files. One of the main causes of data loss of the laptop is due to complaints of hard drive, which at the same time the reason is more complicated.

In other words, in the case of a laptop hard drive data recovery, DIY or use free software can be harm than good, such as hard drives in laptops are relatively small compared to hard drives installed in desktop computers. In other words, any wrong move can sometimes damage the laptop and the data it contains, and therefore must be handled with care.

Contact a data recovery service provider and recovery would be one with fast, reliable and trouble-free to save your data lost. As they provide access to data experts and engineers and technicians file recovery associated with an excellent, dust, environmental clean lab, a specialist data recovery company or you could help recover data that was lost due to a number of reasons, logic and physical damage to natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes.

A laptop hard drive recovery experts is competent enough to recover data from almost all types of portable hard drives as Parallel ATA (PATA), Serial ATA (SATA), Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) and Solid State Drives (SSD). In addition to the home service, some companies even make on-site services portable hard drive data recovery, however, by cause of data loss. There are also companies that make professional courier pick up services.

Laptop Data Recovery - Creative IT is a data recovery company based leader in central London, United Kingdom and offers unmatched quality, instant and efficient data retrieval and recovery services for individuals, businesses and multinationals. We can get productive 99% of your lost data and in most cases we try to return the recovered data within 24-48 hours!

We have a group of highly qualified engineers available to help solve problem any laptop hard drive recovery data. To learn more about how we can assist recovery hard drive can save you time and money on the laptop data recovery, call us on 020 7237 6805.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4065056


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Efficient Hard Disk/Drive Data Recovery

Efficient Hard Disk/ Drive Data Recovery

Hard disk storage device base that is used in a computer for data storage. As the use of this device is, in general terms the issues or problems with this area are also expected to be more frequent and sometimes unavoidable. Since you store important data in it, recovering the data becomes the first thing to do. This data loss can occur due to system crashes and many other reasons discussed below.

Hard disk/drive will be overwritten as a result of many causes. The reasons can be classified into two cases - damage the physical and logical damage.

Physical damage: physical damage is induced due to natural disasters and changes in power and mishandling. If you hear a rattling sound from the disk, shut down the system immediately, as further use will only make things worse and can even lead to permanent loss of data from the hard drive.

Logical damage: Some of the causes of damage are logical human error, system crash, software malfunction, act of viruses and corruption. Hard drive disaster will make your data stored on the disk inaccessible. However, the information lost due to a logic error will be recovered using the hard drive data recovery application.

The general symptoms of the corruption of the hard drive are: book disk failure, system malfunction, error blue or black screen, the system reboots repeated freezing discs and suspension system.

To achieve an efficient recovery of lost data, the following precautions must be taken -

• Stop using the hard drive crashed right away.
• Avoid running a recovery utility on the disk, as this could result in permanent data loss.
• Do not save or re-install whatever applications on the hard drive crashed.
• Avoid running the system utilities such as disk defragmentation and chkdsk, as they record data from the crash data.
• Do not restart the system as it is to save or writing data on damaged hard drive.
• Installing new applications or software should be avoided.

Buy an excellent software to recover data from hard disk crashed. Just before the purchase of computer software, make sure that if the software can recover data from two file systems. If you want to recover data from NTFS, you can use an NTFS partition recovery software system. Always download the track from the utility to check the software's ability to restore data from the hard drive crashed.

John Samuel is an expert writer with many years of experience in dealing with software applications. He has published numerous articles on the best software Hard Drive Recovery and Disk Data Recovery.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_T_Samuel



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Free Download - Hard drive data recovery software

Free Download - Hard drive data recovery software

Hard drives are prone to failure. Some disk drive can take 10 years to fail, some may even take less than a year to fail. Hard drive manufactures say they are not subject to normal conditions and fail. But every time hard disk failure is either due to a collision or logical reason for the loss of important data physical crash occur.

But for the rehabilitation of these crash recovery software logic data are available for free download that can determine the software before you buy. These data recovery software helps us to bring our lost data. They provide not only data recovery, but also provides the recovery partition our logically crashed hard drives.

Hard drive data recovery download free software online has become fairly common. A number of good companies has made the availability of data recovery software for free downloads. Free software for recovering data increases as more and more people understand that this software offers a fair chance to get the idea of retrieving data from their hard disk before deciding to purchase.

Now, if you're one of those who are looking for downloads free data recovery software then you should look at the company mentioned below to download the software. Just visit this site search the data recovery software according to your need according to the operating system and file system, then download the software to see the preview of recovered data.

Stellar Information is a software company that provides data recovery download free software hard drive data recovery for Windows, Unix. Apple, Linux and Macintosh. The most common download for Windows is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery Software, File and Partition Recovery software which provides
data recovery from formatted hard disk or data loss occurs due to software malfunction, virus, delete the file / directory or even sabotage.

The main features of Stellar Phoenix include:

* Advanced Search: Recover files from severely damaged disk.
* RAW File Recovery: Recover more than 300 file types in case of serious corruption of system files.
* Enhanced Photo Recovery: Recover RAW file format files.
* Compressed FS Recovery: You can recover data from compressed NTFS file system.
* Create an image: Recover files from storage media having a lot of bad sectors.
* File Preview: View the contents of the file and make a purchase insured.
* Media Support: Recover data from hard disk, diskette, CD, DVD, USB storage media.
* Recovery Options: Recover large volume of data in compressed format or an FTP server.

Free demo version available at: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm


About the Author

Andrew Watson a student of Mass Communication doing research on data recovery software. There is also a freelance http://www.stellarinfo.com



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