Desktop Data Recovery 101 | Head Crashes
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Is Your Hard Drive No Longer Recognized? Power it Off to Increase Your Chances of a Successful Recovery!
Below is a picture of a crashed hard drive
The ring in the middle of the platter in the picture below is more than enough to make all of the data on a hard drive completely unrecoverable. This type of damage often starts with a small head crash that makes the heads fly uneven until they eventually bite down and score or scratch the platters.
Head crashes often spread platter dust and debris to the other platters of the hard drive. The dust acts like sand paper which quickly spreads damage to all of the other platter surfaces of the drive. This is how your data can be made unrecoverable very quickly.
How to Increase the Chances of a Successful Recovery of Your Data!
How do the heads of a hard drive work?
Powering off your desktop computer or hard drive when your hard drive first starts having problems or stops recognizing is the number one thing you can do to increase the chance of a successful recovery of your data. Too many people continue messing with their hard drives. They give it to a friend, computer shop or IT guy to attempt recovery. These mistakes often lead to complete data loss from a hard drive that would have otherwise been recoverable File Savers.
Data Recovery Professional VS Computer Shop or IT guy
Data recovery is a very specialized process. A true data recovery engineer is like a brain surgeon. He uses specialized techniques, equipment and tools that are designed to work with your dead, damaged or failed hard drive.
Computer shops typically only replace broken parts on computers to get them working again. They also remove viruses so that your computer will continue to work the way its supposed to. If your hard drive fails a computer shop can replace your HDD and reinstall the operating system but you need a specialized data recovery service to recover your data. Most computer shops do not specialize in recovering data from mechanically failed hard drives. Data recovery is the process of extracting your important files out of your failed or failing hard drive.
Computer shops that do offer data recovery typically attempt to recovery data using basic software. This software is not designed to recover data from failed or failing hard drives. In-fact, using software to attempt recovery from a failed or failing hard drive can actually destroy any chance of a successful recovery.