data recovery
DIY Data Recovery Only If You Are Happy To Lose It All
Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | Computer Research | No Comments
In recent times with the “Credit Crunch” beginning to bite a lot of people may well be tempted to try to repair or recover their data from a failed hard disk drive or memory stick. Alternatively they try to use recovery software, which is easily available on the net, can be paid for and downloaded online.
In most cases this software will be a hard drive recovery programme for a hard disk drive that has suffered from some form of logical table corruption and will not assist with
- Mechanically failed devices
- Degraded hard Disk Drives
- Devices with electronic failures
This software will of course not be able to help and if the drive is degraded or suffering from a mechanical failure attempting to run this software will in most cases cause further damage to hard disk drives, potentially making the disk unrecoverable.
The software itself is very often very reasonable priced – usually under $100 but is only good for one purpose to recover either deleted or logically failed drives, so if you are not sure what you are doing trying to do a self recovery can in the long run cost a lot more.
There are of course a lot of IT experts around of course and you may even have some in your own business, but do they really know what they are doing when it comes to the serious issue of data recovery? You would think that your onsite IT support would be data aware bit this is quite often simply not the case.
In a typical case a drive was initially presented for diagnosis and duly diagnosed with a blown PCB – the drive seemed completely dead and would not spin at all. As an additional test a new PCB was placed on the board so that the response of the heads could be tested. The result of this test was that the heads appeared to have been “blown” by a power surge through the drive.
Upon further discussion, with the client, it transpired that the IT dept had decided to remove the HDD from the laptop and as it was an IDE device mount it as an external storage device by using an IDE connector. Unfortunately they plugged the HDD to the connector “upside down” meaning that crucially the drive received a huge power spike through it when the connector was hooked up to a PC.
It may well have been in this particular scenario that the actual problem could have been no more a few bad sectors on the disk, however due to a certain level of incompetence within this department what originally was more than likely a simple job for a data professional turned into a much more costly full drive rebuild.
Many businesses need to get their data back as quickly as possibly so it is quite frustrating to have additional costs and additional downtime whilst you are waiting for data to be recovered
Sadly this is not an isolated case and data recovery companies the world over will have a whol;e collection of stories where simple recoveries were turned into data disasters by the DIY and have a go brigade
So the moral of this is that whilst many people will look for a quick and cheap fix for their hard drive recovery problems, they really are best leaving it to the experts.