Bay Area Computer
Consuting Data Recovery
Hard Drive Crashed? Bay Area Computer Consuting affordable
data recovery service restores critical business information
or any other data from hard drives that have suffered accidental
formatting, deletion, severe crash, equipment malfunction,
software corruption, computer virus, natural disasters and
power surge and outages.
When your hard disk drive or RAID drive array
crashes, Bay Area Computer Consuting Data Recovery can offer
a fast, professional and cost-effective data recovery solution.
Personal computers, workstations, laptops and even the best-configured
fault-tolerant system can fail due to:
-Inaccessible disk drive or partitions
-Data corruption
-RAID configuration lost
-Mechanical hard drive failure
-Hard drive surface damage
-Accidental data or file deletion
-Intermittent drive failure resulting
-in RAID degradation
-Corrupted database
-Deleted tables or system objects
-Accidental reformatting of RAID
-Deleted or corrupted log file
-Overwritten Tapes
-File system corruption
Once your data is recovered it is taken through a strict quality
control process to ensure the data is in a useable format.
Your data will be returned to you on the media of your choice.
In most cases, CD/DVD-ROM's are utilized but hard disk drives
are also available when needed.
Related information:
Hard Drive Failure
Posted Sep 27, 2007
Hard Drives
Author
David Risley
Sooner or later, all hard drives crash. It is only a matter
of when. When it happens, the degree of sweat and tears you
experience is directly related to how prepared you were for
it to begin with. Backing up your data is important. I even
have two computers which are set up almost identically so
that if the drive on one of my machines dies, I don’t
lose any worktime or data. Preparation is the best medicine,
but this stuff happens anyway.
Warning Signs
In some cases, you start to see signs of a problem before
the drive up and dies on you. Early warning signs include:
Computer freezes often. When it happens, the mouse cursor
is unmovable and keyboard input is ignored. Nothing works
and a restart is required to recover the computer.
Files Mysterious disappearing.
Frequent lock-up during booting. I say “frequent”
because all computers will freeze every now and then and it
doesn’t necessarily mean the drive is failing. You’re
looking for a pattern here.
File access mysteriously slows to a turtle’s pace. Saving
files or open files simply takes forever.
These are typical warning signs of a pending drive failure.
When you start to see a noticeable increase in these patterns,
backing up your data needs to take top priority. Otherwise
you really are playing Russian roulette with your hard drive.
Signs of Real Failure
When the drive actually fails, it is a mechanical failure.
Many times you will actually hear the drive making strange
metallic noises. This is the read/write head thrashing around
aimlessly and indicates failure. When your system has a crashed
hard drive, it will not be able to boot. You may even get
a blue screen of death.
Hard drive failure is a black and white thing. If the drive
is working at all, you have a drive which is about to fail
and is exhibiting the above warning signs in varying degrees.
Once actual failure occurs, it just doesn’t work.
Diagnostics
The first thing to do is run through some inspection of the
computer to see if this is indeed a drive failure. Here is
a basic checklist. Now, if the PC was working fine and then
just stopped working, chances are these items are not the
case.
Check to ensure the power cable is properly connected to
the drive.
Check to be sure the data cable is properly connected to the
drive.
If it is an IDE drive, ensure the ribbon cable is aligned
properly. Red edge of the cable is aligned with Pin 1 of the
connector on the drive. Pin 1 is closest to the power plug,
typically.
Master/slave assignment is correctly set if this is an IDE
drive.
Once the physical connections have been verified, it’s
good to see if the computer can even see the drive at all.
If this is an IDE drive, go into the computer’s BIOS
and have it auto-detect the drive. If it can detect it, then
we know we have a solid connection. It doesn’t mean
the drive is good, just that the BIOS can see it.
Using a bootable diskette for your anti-virus program, reboot
and run a scan on the drive. It will scan the drive, including
the boot partition, for viruses. If it finds anything, let
it do it’s job. If it is able to successfully scan the
drive at all, the drive is at least still working.
Use a third-party disk management program or simply FDISK
to view the partitions on the drive. If no active partitions
are found, then you know the partitions are screwed up. Unfortunately,
that would be bad news. You can try a data recovery utility
(see below) to recover the data. Otherwise, you will need
to re-partition the drive and lose your data in the process.
You may want to run a ScanDisk or Check Disk on the drive.
This is best if the drive is functioning partially. If you
have a full mechanical failure, nothing will work. If some
data is retrievable but others are not, then we have a partial
failure. Try running Scandisk or Check Disk to scan the drive.
Allow it to perform a full scan and fix anything it finds.
Yep, It’s Gone. Now What?
Well, first off, my heart goes out to you. If you didn’t
use backups, you just lost a bunch of data. If you did, you
are minimally looking at the annoying experience of having
to set up the entire computer again.
Either way, you will need a new hard drive. Once installed,
you set up the new hard drive as usual and re-install all
your software. You then restore all your backups and you (hopefully)
are good to go. Just trash the old drive. The data is not
retrievable in most cases which means that throwing it away
with your data on it is not really a risk.
Data Recovery
Too commonly people lose a hard drive that had data on it
that was not backed up. These are the people who are then
scrambling for ways to recover the data from a crashed hard
drive. In some cases, this can be done. You should know up
front, though, that it is going to cost you some money. Perhaps
a lot of money. As of now, a quick Google search shows typical
price ranges between $300 and $400. It isn’t cheap and
you need to weigh out the cost of the service versus the cost
of losing the data.
The art of data recovery depends solely on the nature of
the drive failure. For example, if the electronics of the
drive died but the mechanics are OK, then replacing the electronic
board can revive the drive. Also, if the read/write head died
but the platters still spin and are intact, then the data
is still there. A new read/write head is needed to get the
data.
The first thing would be to have your drive evaluated by
a data recovery service. Since data recovery is very custom
to the nature of the failure, prices vary.
Software Options
And since I know people will ask, no, there is no software
utility out there that can recover data from a crashed hard
drive. If the drive is not really crashed, then perhaps a
disk utility can help you recover something. But, a true crash
is a problem with the drive itself, and no software can overcome
that one.
The data recovery software one finds when searching for it
is designed to recover from accidental deletes or corrupted
file structure. If these thing happen, there is a chance you
can recover it on your own. Once the drive actually dies,
though, your only option is to use a data recovery service.
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