Data Recovery As Used For Damaged Or Corrupted Hard Drives.

Data recovery has become an umbrella term that includes just about every aspect of recovering from either a physical or logical system crash. The mission of the data recovery blog is to help people understand the cause of their current system failure difficulty and then to find the best solution for that failure.

First let us divide system failure into two distinct areas. These are physical damage and logical crash. As the name would imply, physical damage refers to loss of information due to a component of hardware designated for either retrieval or storage of digital information. A logical crash refers to a corruption of the basis for information retrieval such as an algorithmic code or damage to the digital information itself. Oddly enough said damage resembles symptoms for physical failure.

To simplify physical damage further, one should think in terms of the specific hardware and media used for storing data. For example DVDs and CDs can be scratched to a point where they cannot be read. The surface of a hard drive disk can be reached by moisture resulting in a defect that of course cannot be optically or magnetically read. Other hardware failure involves circuit boards used to control spinning platters becoming overheated and motors used to spin said platters simply burning out. Heat and moisture cause 95% of all hard drive repair necessity. The remaining physical damage occurs due to units being dropped on struck with force.

So how can we effect data recovery from any and all damaged hardware? In the case of our damaged DVDs we simply use a machine to polish off the scratches and hope the media can once again be read. In the case of the damaged hard drive we have several options. If the damage is due to an over heated and thus fried control board we replace the board so as to gain the time to rescue our data onto another storage device. Motors can be replaced with this same intent. Generally any hard drive that has sustained a failure is no longer a trusted candidate for data storage. And it should be noted that new hard drives are inexpensive. Unless we are dealing with huge storage arrays, repairing of a hard disk unit for reuse is never a good financial choice. When dealing with physical damage to storage devices and media we have one goal, and that is to safely retrieve as much of our lost data as is possible. The specific techniques used to that end are referred to as hard drive repair.

Hard drive repair requires a tremendously high technical ability as well as an ISO certified cleanroom environment. As few business and personal computer users have these available the entire process of hard drive repair for the purpose of data recovery must be turned over to a firm specializing in such procedures. It is important to note that one’s local computer repair firm will never have the skills or equipment needed to repair damaged hard disks.

Consider again the objective remains to retrieve data and that most often a computer hard drive will be so damaged it can not be easily made operable even long enough for data retrieval. In these most common cases a professional data recovery firm will dismantle a hard drive in cleanroom conditions and then create a disk image of the information on the damaged drive. Most techniques and equipment used for this purpose is completely proprietary to the repair firm. Meaning… they know how to recreate your data with programs and devices they have built and are not likely to share that knowledge. Data recovery from physically damaged hard drives is done at a cost.

Logical Damage is by far a much simpler data recovery problem. The most common cause for logical crash problems is power outages or surges during processes of writing information to disk. In older computers it was almost a guarantee that should a computer suffer a power outages while booting up the hard drive would crash. Oddly most computer repair firms purported this to their customers as a physical crash and then charged for repairs on that basis. Consider that a basically health computer is not likely to suddenly suffer physical damage. Hard drives fail to respond when information is improperly written. Supposing one was to type the word hippopotamus. Now consider if it were being changed to elephant. Now if during the process of retyping this word the typist were interrupted, result would be an elepotamus. And there is no such animal. This is how logical crashes occur. Data is often overwritten improperly or disjunctively. Also data is accidentally deleted that is required for retrieval of other data. A real world analogy for this failure would be if one were to forget the combination to a safe. No amount of guesswork is likely to open the door. These two scenarios form the basis for hard drive failure due to a logical crash. And repair of them is fairly simple.

Logical crash data recovery requires a suite of software tools designed for that purpose. In the case of partially overwritten data (the elepotamus) there are programs available that will determine what the previous state of the data was and recreate it. Much as our hypothetical typist would upon reading the incorrect word. Quality data recovery software will “figure out’ what was supposed to be and then rebuild this. Hence when we go to access the data a semblance of the original information is presented. In our second logical crash scenario we must recover data that we are essentially locked out of. The same quality data recovery software will rebuild the partitioning sections of a hard disk recreating access to the inner information. Much as one my replace a faulty lock.

Data recovery as caused by a logical crash can be accomplished by almost any computer user regardless of the level of their technical expertise. All that is required is a quality data recovery program of which there are several available.

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