Knowing Your Hard Drive - A Guide to Data Recovery

Hard drives are usually reliable devices that store all your important files and data. Today’s Information Age runs on data, making the storage of such worth its weight in gold. However, no matter how evolved this technology has become, these media devices are still prone to serious errors that could result in the loss of invaluable data. Hard drives may crash or may develop logical errors.

Most data crashes occur when some physical or logical error is introduced into a system. Hard disks, CD-ROMs, Tape Drives and other storage media can and will fail eventually. This could be caused by a host reasons – power outages, physical damage to media, head crashes, motor problems and the like.

Whatever the reason, you will need a means to restore all this data. This is especially true if for some reason the deleted, destroyed or corrupted data contains information that is not backed up or existing in any other location anyway.

You will also want to get your hard disk in running order again, if that is possible.

Signs and Symptoms to Look out For
Most hard disks show signs of croaking before completely crashing. Symptoms of an impending crash include frequent disk error messages, the disk not showing during start up, garbled information regarding the disk when analyzed, and weird clicking or whirring sounds.

If you notice any of these back up at all costs! This ensures that you at least have your data safe before anything untoward happens to your hard disk.

Some disks suddenly croak without a warning. You can, however, gauge and maintenance your hard disk by running a check disk utility to scan and repair logical errors. Bad sectors get marked too so data is no longer stored there.

Reasons for a Crash
Hard disks crash for various reasons. One of the more predictable offenders is unstable power supply. When there is a sudden power outage or sudden power surge, hard disks can take quite a pounding. Aside from physically damaging the disk, logical errors to the disk’s file system can be traced to this reason.

Logical errors for such happen when the disk suddenly loses power while it is writing critical information to the disk. Such errors can make the data on the disk unreadable unless the file system is corrected.

Viruses and malicious code can also be a cause for a crash, as well as the ill handling of a disk – sudden shock, dropping, or magnetizing can seriously damage your hard disk.

What to do
If you hard disk does crash, the simplest thing to do is to go for your back ups. If the data you need is not backed up. You can try recovering the data yourself.

There are softwares available that can help recover your hard disk’s data and even make your hard disk usable again. These softwares try a low-level read and access of your hard disk and are usually able to at least recover some of the data.

Some software applications can recover deleted or corrupt data. They also are able to correct file system errors and logical errors that beset your hard disk.

But in the case of truly important data, like that of company data and others, you may want to employ the services of a data recovery expert. They have both the expertise and equipment to handle a problem like yours.

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