How you handle signs of data loss can dramatically increase or decrease your chances of success. So once you have experience signs of potential failure its best to act quickly. In the case of a head crash, you will more than likely damage the platters and destroy critical data if you continue to power up the drive.

It’s not what you want to hear, however some drives are just beyond repair, and whether that be a physical issue or a logical issue, some drives are just simply unrecoverable. It’s been stated in other articles, but needs repeating, make sure you take good practices early on to back up and save information. It doesn’t solve the problem of disk failure, but it sure lessens the pain of needing to recover lost data.

Even if your drive seems to be functioning properly, but has suffered a logical failure, avoid running applications that may risk writing data to the drive. Some off the shelf data recovery programs do exactly that. So while you may end up with some data you need, other data may be gone forever unless you submit the drive to a qualified services company. Our suggestion is to seek professional help to recover lost data and not to try and do it yourself.

Even if your drive seems to be functioning properly, but has suffered a logical failure, avoid running applications that may risk writing data to the drive. Some off the shelf data recovery programs do exactly that. So while you may end up with some data you need, other data may be gone forever unless you submit the drive to a qualified services company. Our suggestion is to seek professional help to recover lost data and not to try and do it yourself.

If you are a Comcast customer there are some great tools at your disposal to help take a proactive stance on your system management.  Consider looking further in the Comcast virus protection tools offered as a way to manage another are of your online experience.

Unfortunately, most physical damage cannot be repaired by users and needs to taken to a professional. Users normally do not have the hardware or expertise needed to make these repairs. Often data recovery companies are employed to save important data and the cost can be high. These companies will use sterile facilities to assure the media is protected during repairs.

The need to recover lost data from hardware suffering physically damaged can involve many techniques.  Damages can be repaired by replacing parts in the hard disk. This may make the disk usable; however there could still be logical damage.

If the media has suffered a major electric failure it will require the need to recover lost data in order to salvage its contents.

Consider checking your warranty, many procedures can and will void your warranty, resulting in a failure to recover lost data from a hard disk drive.

Extracted images may be used to rebuild data after any logical damage has been repaired. After this has been completed files can be in usable form although recovery is often incomplete.

There are open source tools such as HDClone and DCFLdd that can recover data from all but the physically damaged sectors. A 2007 Defense Cyber Crime Institute study shows that the DCFLdd v1.3.4-1 installed on a Linux 2.4 Kernel system produces extra “bad sectors”, resulting in the loss of information that is actually available. The study states that when installed on a FreeBSD Kernel system, only the bad sectors are lost.

Hard Disk Drive data recovery has the following abilities:

• Bypassing the BIOS and operating system which are very limited in their abilities to deal with drives that have “bad sectors” or take a long time to read
• Reading data from “bad sectors” rather than skipping them (by using various read commands and ECC to recreate damaged data)
• Handling issues caused by unstable drives, such as resetting/repowering the drive when it stops responding or skipping sectors that take too long to read (read instability can be caused by minute mechanical wear and other issues).
• Pre-configuring drives by disabling certain features, such a SMART and G-List re-mapping, to minimize imaging time and the possibility of further drive degradation.