Secrets of hard drive data recovery

Most of us wonder what do the people in data recovery labs do to recover data from your drive. If you see data recovery as a process, it does not involve any planned actions, as it is always a reaction based on the cause for data loss.

Let us categorize it in two major categories

a) Physical Crash – where drive is not getting detected by the BIOS of your PC and the drive has either electronic, mechanical failure or some kind of damage such as accidentally dropping the drive, fire, flood or any other external cause.

Recovery from such cases involves an attempt from an experienced recovery professional to make drive working by any means. If drive has electronic failure, the engineer would try to look for similar electronic board in the inventory to make drive working. If the cause is mechanical which is mainly head making clicking sound, is broken or is jammed are repaired by opening it in a class 100 environment and it is not necessary that it has to be a clean room and it is impractical to have a clean room for such small device.

I have heard of many tricks people try to make drive working in such cases, for e.g. dropping drive from a small height on a soft surface to ease any jam. Freezing the drive if drive has quick heating problems, let me tell you these attempts are extremely dangerous and can make the drive permanently damaged.

I have heard of many tricks people try to make drive working in such cases, for e.g. dropping drive from a small height on a soft surface to ease any jam. Freezing the drive if drive has quick heating problems, let me tell you these attempts are extremely dangerous and can make the drive permanently damaged.

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Professional physical crash recovery requires an experienced electronics and mechanical engineer to work on your drive. They will do various component transplant operations from a similar make and model drive and would do every attempt to make drive working.

Once they are successful they would use specialized or in-house developed software to create an exact replica of the drive as they get the access to the drive for a very short duration and these specialized software will create the replicas very fast. Replica is the working source and if required any tool required would be used to extract data. Recovering from damaged drives due to water or fire is an extremely sophisticated technique, which is with only few data recovery companies.

b) Logical crash – I think my whole blog until now has been dedicated to such recovery and it is the most commonly occurring problem. The healthy drive faces logical issues, which could be due to human error, like formatting the drive, deleting important data or any sort of crash caused due to any application or external source creating in accessibility of data.

Simply use data recovery software with respect to the file system of your drive or partitions and recover your data, chances of recovery in Windows are affected by the level of fragmentation and health of the file.