Hard Drive Data Recovery: What to Do When Your Hard Drive Fails

Hard drive failure and data loss costs the average company from $500 to $2,500 per incident, with the higher end of the figure coming into play if the company had to call in an outside professional data recovery company. The most common cause of data loss leading to a need for data recovery is hard drive failure. Since hard drives have a limited life, hard drive failure is inevitable. If you plan carefully, though, hard drive failure doesn’t necessarily have to lead to data loss. These strategies can help you deal with hard drive data recovery and reduce the chances that you’ll need data recovery services from an outside company.

If a system hard drive fails to boot, immediately shut the computer down. If the data on the drive in question is critical to your firm and you have no backup, do not attempt to recover the data yourself. Any action you take carries the risk of making it impossible for even the best data recovery companies, such as Fields Data Recovery, to retrieve your files. Immediately contact a professional data recovery company to get instructions.

If, on the other hand, you can afford to lose the data on the drive, you can attempt some do-it-yourself data recovery options. Avoid using system software, such as chkdsk, to repair the file system, though. Most system recovery software is designed to repair your file systems, not preserve the data. There’s a good chance that the system will overwrite your data. If it’s not overwritten, it may be in chunked files that will take days to piece together.

Before you attempt any DIY data recovery operations, determine whether the disk failure is due to a software problem – deleted file, virus or operating system failure, for example – or a problem with the physical drive. If it’s software-related, you can attempt to recover the data using data recovery software. Before you do, though, remove the hard drive from the computer and install it in a USB enclosure to minimize disk utilization during boot and reduce the chances of causing more damage. Follow the instructions on your data recovery software. Again, if the drive contains mission-critical data, don’t even try this. Contact a pro data recovery service and hand the job over to them.

Do not open the drive case or attempt to swap the disk to a new drive. In either case, you risk destroying the drive and making it impossible to recover any data from the disk even for the best professional hard drive data recovery services.

If there are bad sectors on your drive, do not attempt to repair the bad sectors or read data from them with data recovery software. Either one may overwrite the underlying data or destroy it entirely.

Never attempt to power up a system that has suffered physical damage from water, fire, electrical failure or vandalism. Instead, contact a professional data recovery company to do the job for you.