Thalasar Ventures

This is a situation that every tech support person has faced or will face at least once: a failed hard drive. In this particular case, a user was getting errors like “disk 0 error” and “invalid drive specification. “

Here were the other facts in the case:

• The data wasn’t backed up.
• The problem came out of nowhere.
• The user had accessed Setup and tried to manually enter the settings for the drive type when”Auto” didn’t work.
• There was no start up disk made by this machine.

Repair a drive like that one-even if only long enough to copy its data before you throw the drive in the garbage-is a tough challenge. Compared to buy a new drive, the price of Data Recovery nowadays is still a very expensive option.

While the Freeze it, Hit it, and Drop it options are still experimented with by some, the current size and sensitivity of the newer larger hard drives makes these options extremely risky and definitely NOT recommended for hard drives with a capacity that’s greater than 60GB. And even then some of the operation suggested here should be approached with caution. Getting it wrong by trying to save some money will only end up costing you more if you then decide to pass on your hard drive to a data recovery company. . .

There are, broadly speaking three classes of data recovery, Logical, Electronic, and Physical.

• Logical Where the FAT, NTFS or other file structure has been corrupted either by accident or on purpose or individual filed or folders have gone missing. The hard drive has not suffered damage to the components of the hard drive itself.
• Electronic Component failure on the PCB (the circuit board on the bottom of the hard drive) in the motor or internally.
• Physical Internal damage to the hard drive, damaged platters, head crashes, damage to the motor, or head rack signal amplifier. You need a clean room and plenty of experience to have any chance of a successful outcome here.

Logical recoveries are becoming an affordable option for those people who are familiar with the risks involved with data recovery. Software tools that are now available for this task vary greatly in their capability, complexity and cost. Careful research should be done before any work is done on the damaged hard drive. If you are able, get another hard drive and experiment. Format it, Fdisk it, delete files and partitions and learn how the data recovery software operates under these various conditions. Before to start work on your own or your clients hard drive back it up, the backup mantra is one that you all should be familiar with by now! There are tools available to backup (or image) a hard drive that has been fdisked!! Use them. Ghost software is not suitable for this task, then perform your recovery attempts on the image not the original.

For the Electronic damaged, you must need some extra hdd repair tools to exchange the PCB or Head or other components, as far as we know, nowadays one tool called HD HPE Pro produced by SalvationDATA can do the excellent job of exchanging drive’s components. Many data recovery companies now using this tool, also nowadays there are many faked tools in the market which price is lower than SalvationDATA, but with bad quality.

As for the Physical problems of the drives, if the situation happened in several years ago, then even the best professional data recovery company will say that they have no choice.