Hard Disk Recovery

Last month I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1720 with all the RAM and processing power that I could get. I also picked a 320GB hard drive to store my data files. Being involved with data recovery in one way or another for the last nine years has certainly prepared me for what happened last week.

My hard drive crashed in a laptop that was not even 20 days old. It not only crashed, but had significant sector damage. How could this happen in a brand new laptop? Well the fact is every hard drive that goes out to the general public is released with bad sectors. There is S.M.A.R.T Technology and Sector Maps that are there to protect clients from data loss. If you want to know more about those 2 things read my wife Victoria’s post: Hard Drives A Destiny Of Failure to learn more.

Anyway, here I am with a damaged hard drive and a laptop so new that I hadn’t started backing up my data fully yet. I then remembered an article that Jacqui Best, our support team leader wrote about BART PE which is a Bootable CD For Data Recovery, and I used the info in that post to get off my files.

The moral of this story is to start your data backup routines at once! After you have all you settings customized to your needs, clone your hard drive! This way the restore process is much easier. I spent 2 days getting my laptop back to were it needed to be. Fortunately I did not need hard drive recovery!