Archive for August, 2007

Disk Crash Recovery Tips

August 18th, 2007

Most of us are dependent on our computers for our living in one or the other way. Either we do a business or are in a job or use computers in our daily life requirements, computers are everywhere. With computers come the problems associated with them. Here I am talking about the most disastrous problem with computers, that is, hard drive crash. The diagnosis of hard drive crash alone is sufficient to drive you crazy as all your data is lost with that horrifying scratching and screeching sound. Recently, the hard drive of my computer crashed and I was in the middle of nowhere as all my business data was lost with it. Then like angels in the devils room, the hard disk data recovery service entered in my life which helped me a lot to get out of this misery.

All my miseries ended since I associated myself with hard disk data recovery service. The technical engineer explained me that the data recovery in case of hard disk crash is not always an easy task. It depends on severity of the problem whether the data recovery is easy or complex, expensive or cheap. The technical engineer told me that sometimes the problem is only due to the fact that there is some minor problem with the loading mechanism of the hard drive. Although there are many factors for a hard disk crash but usually the potentially cause for a hard disk crash that necessitate a hard disk data recovery is when any one of these dozens of programs and macros which have to be loaded to enable the computer to boot successfully becomes cross-linked or there is any error with one or more of it’s files. In such a case the data recovery is very easy as you can simply slave boot the hard drive to another one and extract the data from it.

However, the hard disk data recovery can be a much more difficult and problematic task even for the professional if you actually scratch the disk’s surface. One of the alternatives in this case is to recover as much data as you can physically from the data using a simple software hard disk data recovery but it would not be able to recover the data from the scratched surface. The data at the place where it is scratched may be lost. The hard disk data recovery can cost you thousands of dollars if the hard disk is badly scratched and would not spin without doing further damage to the disk. In this case the hard disk is separated from the system and the plates of hard disk are analyzed by sophisticated and expensive machinery.

In case you are wondering, RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, as it is an assembly of more than one hard drive in a single unit. The advantages of this are numerous, but the most important one is the fact that even if one of the hard drives has failed, the computer is still able to serve its purpose and perform all the tasks the user desires. The issue of data loss in this case is not so severe, as the multiple hard drives offer higher protection against accidental damaging the data. So, why would you need RAID data recovery? Well, RAID is said to indeed protect your data when one of the hard drives fails, by increasing system uptime and network availability. Not to speak of the fact that more than one hard disk working together will significantly increase the performance of your system!

Generally speaking, RAID data recovery is most definitely the most complicated thing that a data recovery specialist or company can perform on a system. It is their mission to repair the damages that the user has done before taking the hard drives to the technician for recovery. Most of the clients of these data recovery firms attempt to recover the data or even repair the array of hard disks by using the system utilities they can get their hands on. This may be all right for the situation when the lost data is not critical to the company, but if these unprofessional methods fail, someone could loose his or her job!

Therefore, in case of a RAID failure, the best thing one can do is take it to a data recovery company and let them do their jobs properly. Even if the process of RAID data recovery can cost a lot of money, it is much better to have a specialists take it through the set procedure that the data recovery companies follow. They start by ensuring that all the hard drives are functional, as this is a major factor in the success of the whole data recovery process. Only then they start making complete sector-by-sector clones of every drive, a process that takes place at a very low level and is not affected by the bad sectors. Your initial hard drive is set to a write protect mode during this process, in order to make sure that your original data is not in danger of being modified in any way.

After cloning, your hard drives are no longer needed, as the recovery process is being done on these cloned copies. The clones of your hard drives are then put into a system and all the data scattered among the drives in the array will be put into an unique destination drive. This is the point when a normal recovery process can start, as there is only one drive left!