Data Recover Of A QuickBooks File

Many companies and people rely on QuickBooks to manage their money and accounts. If you have had data loss to your QuickBooks file this article can help you get your data back. If your hard disk can’t be accessed you might need hard drive recovery prior to the actual QuickBooks file restoration.

QuickBooks File Recovery Without Hard Drive Repair

In a situation where your hard drive has been formatted and the OS reloaded, or there has been a catastrophic crash to where you can no longer access the data due to some sort of logical anomaly (this means not PHYSICALLY damaged), but you need your QBB or QBW files back there is an answer.

Intuit in all their wonderful support offers a service to their customers. You can call them up, explain that you need your QuickBooks file back and they will have you send them the hard drive. They have their own software that will piece you file back together and they will send you the file back. This is a phenomenal service that they offer, for a nominal fee. From the customers I have talked to it is only about 300 bucks to get them to do this for you, so give them a call if you need your QBW,QBB files back at 1-888-320-7276.

Physical Hard Drive Crash QuickBooks File Data Recovery

So what do you do when Intuit can’t recover the file because it can’t be gotten off the hard drive? Well then it is time to call DTI Data! We offer no data no charge upfront flat rate pricing on all hard drive recovery. That means you will know exactly what it will cost to have your data recovered. We have a class 100 clean room to perform physical hard drive repair in.

Call 24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665. Or fill out an Online Data Recovery Quote If you need hard drive recovery.

Do It Yourself Solution: Hard Drive Crash Recovery

Have you ever booted your computer and gotten the message “No boot device found”? So, you boot the computer again, and get the same message, only this time you notice that the POST does not list your hard drive as one of your boot devices? Where did it go? What happened? It was working yesterday when I shut down, why isn’t working now?

There are several reasons why your hard drive will disappear from the POST list, and the BIOS will refuse to list it. The following is an explanation and a remedy for one of these reasons.

Every hard drive is unique. What I mean by that is every hard drive, even though it may be the same make, model, size etcetera they are unique in reference to performance. As an example, you may have a Seagate 80 Gb hard drive that says it is 7200 RPM.   Well, not every drive will spin at exactly 7200 RPM. In order to make the drives affordable to us the drives are built to a certain set of tolerances.   At the factory the drive is ‘burned in’ and these tolerances, as well as many other pieces of data are saved on a special area of the platter called the system area. This area can only be addressed in an ‘engineering’ mode and is transparent to the end user. Sometimes this system area gets corrupted, and the hard drive will not register itself with the BIOS during POST so that you get the message “No Boot Device Found”. Here is a fast and easy fix for a corrupted system area.

First find an exact duplicate of the hard drive that has crashed. When I say exact, I mean exact.  Make, model, firmware rev, and lot must all match. If you have an older drive you have to find a hard drive clearing house to buy the matching drive.   The clearing house will know why you want the drive, so the pricing of the hard drive may be as high as $500.00 depending upon the size, age, and rarity of the drive.

Second using a switchable power/IDE cable you place both drives on the cable with the power switched onto the good drive. You then boot the system with the BIOS recognizing the good hard drive. Once the hard drive is recognized and you are in the operating system, switch the power on to the hard drive that has crashed. The BIOS and the operating system will not know the difference and will try and address the drive.

Third, once this has been completed, using a piece of drive imaging software to clone the drive from the crashed drive to any other drive that is the same size or larger. This may take several hours depending upon the size of the hard drives.

Lastly, once the hard drive cloning process is complete, shut down the system, take all the drives off except of course for the newly cloned drive and then reboot the system. Using a piece of data recovery software, tree the cloned drive and copy all of your data onto another drive.

There you have it, a drive that has lost its system area recovered and your data saved. Instead of paying $2000.00, for hard drive recovery,  you saved yourself a lot of money and time. Good Luck!

Black Art Of Data Recovery: BIOS - MBR - Part Two

Let’s take a look at some of the boot code of a pretty standard MBR. The first thing we want to do is a little house keeping, then relocate the code we loaded at 0000:7C1B to 0000:061B. Which is spelled out in the First Part of - The Black Art Of Data Recovery: BIOS, MBR, Virus.

MOV SI,07C1B  ;set SI (source index) to 7C1B
MOV DI,0061B ;set DI (destination index) to 061B
PUSH AX            ;PUSH AX for segment for RETF to 0
PUSH DI             ;PUSH DI for offset for RETF = 061B
MOV CX,01E5   ;1E5 bytes to copy
REP MOVSB      ;Copy the MBR
RETF                   ;PULL 0000:061B off stack and JMP to MBR

Once we have the bootstrap code relocated we begin to scan the partition table for a bootable partition.The following figure is one record entry in a partition table. There can be a total of four entries in a partition table.

Partition Record Layout

Offset	Size	Description
00h	Byte	Boot flag. 80h if partition is bootable, otherwise 0.
01h	Byte	Starting head(0 to 254)
02h	Word	Starting cylinder (0 to 1023) & sector (1 to 63) number
04h	Byte	Partition type (07 NTFS, 06 FAT16, 0C FAT32)
05h	Byte	Ending head number (0 to 254)
06h	Word	Ending cylinder (0 to 1023) & sector (1 to 63) number
08h	Dword	relative sectors to start of partition
0Ch	Dword	Total number of sectors in partition

Once a bootable partition is found, the boot code pointed to by the relative sectors field of the partition record is read into memory location 0000:7C00 and then an RETF is executed and the boot code for the operating system takes over. This type of boot system is called two phase because the MBR does not load the operating system, it only loads a loader.In other words, the MBR is a preloader for the OS boot loader.

During the boot process and the parsing of the partition records many things can go wrong.If there is not a boot flag set then the system may just hang with a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. You may get the message “Invalid partition table”, if the boot flag is set to something other than zero.You may also get the message “Missing operating system” in the AA55 magic number is not present in the OS boot loader. These errors can be fixed by hand. The following is a step by step approach to fixing the boot flag, as well as the OS magic number.

Repairing Boot Flag with WinHex

Each technician has his own set of tools that he relies on.In my case many of my tools are custom written since I am a software engineer. However, there are some tools that are just so good they cannot be improved upon.WinHex from X-Ways Software is such a tool.It has two attributes that are essential to a technician, one, it is extremely flexible, and two, it is very reliable. So, that being said fire up your copy of WinHex, and if you don’t have a copy, the download one, and let the boot flag repairing begin.First of all, as depicted in Figure A, the boot flag is located at offset 446, or 1BEh.In this particular case the boot flag is set to 80h, which is bit seven set. This is a normal partition record, in a single partitioned hard drive.

Figure A

In Figure B we can see what a multi partitioned drive looks like:

Finally, in Figure C we can see what bad boot flag value looks like. The bad boot flag value in Figure C is the value 65h. In order to fix this problem merely change the value to either 80h if you want it bootable, or 00h if you just want it mounted.

Figure C

As you can see, that hard part is knowing where the boot flags are, and then knowing which values you can place in them in order to mount the volume. I have given them both to you. Learn more about data recovery.

Backup Solution Western Digital My Book Review

A while ago I wrote a post about Western Digital Hard Drive Recovery that outlined different WD hard disks. I had mentioned the My Book as being one of the best solutions. Now that I have been using them (I bough 2 more) I wanted to give everyone a review.

While DTI doesn’t officially recommend any products, we can tell you our honest opinions. Since my husband Michael and I work from our home we have a lot going on, more than the average household. We have 6 computers on our primary network that also has a Network Attached Storage Device attached to it. We are very paranoid about losing data so we have a few backup plans in place. At first the My Book was being used for just backing up, but since Michael has been getting more involved with music producing he has been using the My Book as a full service drive.

We are both very impressed not only with the speed and capacity (1.5 TB), but also how cool it runs. The My Book Premium Edition 2 has 2 hard drives that can either be mirrored or striped depending on if you want safety or performance. We went for performance since everything is backed up on the NAS. The drive is fantastic in every aspect of what we do. We are using Firewire 800 and have it hooked up to one of our Kubuntu machines and it screams!

If you are looking for a solid external hard drive whether for storage or as backup to avoid hard drive recovery, this is the best we have ever used. As far as technical specs I grabbed the main points off of the WD site. If anyone has any questions please leave a comment.

WD’s My Book™ Premium Edition II dual-drive storage system offers RAID mirroring for extra data protection or RAID striping for extraordinary capacity and performance. Triple-interface and a powerful combination of features and performance make this system the storage solution of choice for creative professionals, workgroups, small offices and anyone looking for extra assurance that their data is safe.

My Book Premium Edition II Features

Extraordinary capacity - With up to 1.5 TB of storage in an elegant, small footprint design, you have plenty of space to store an entire digital photo library, your HD movie collection and hours and hours of DV video.Extra data protection - For extra data protection, dedicate half the capacity for mirroring and automatically and instantaneously back up data every time you save it. Extra-fast performance - The lighting-fast combination of FireWire 400/800 and RAID striping yields the speed you need for fast, smooth video editing, an extra-responsive Photoshop scratch disk, rendering complex 3D objects or special effects, and saving huge blocks of data in record time. Easy to set up, easy to use - You’re up and running in a few simple steps. RAID configuration is easy with WD’s intuitive RAID Wizard software User serviceable - Easy access allows you to open the case and replace a drive. No need to send the entire system in for service. Triple interface - Provides flexibility and performance with connections for ultra-fast FireWire 800, as well as FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. WD Backup Software - A simple file-based backup system that’s extremely easy to use. Capacity gauge - See at a glance how much space is available on your storage system. Intelligent drive management features - Automatic power-up, Safe Shutdown™, and LED activity lights make this storage system especially easy to use. Quiet and cool - An efficient convection cooling system and a thermostatically controlled fan keep this unit reliably cool and remarkably quiet.

Beginners Guide To Computers: The Internet Protocol TCP/IP

Welcome to a new series of “Beginners Guides” that DTI Data is publishing to better assist novice to intermediate technicians and end users who are looking for a more clear understanding of basic computer, networking, and security knowledge. These guides may seem very basic for a lot of our viewers, but we recommend that everyone read them in full, as you may be surprised on how useful some of our hints and tricks may be.

No matter how much you have learned or know about these subjects, with the ever changing technologies and infrastructures around us it is important to stay up to date, because these technologies can pass you by in a matter of weeks. These articles are designed to give you a low level understanding of each of their subjects, so that you may be able to diagnose and fix issues that you keep running into without relying on restrictive applications to fix these problems for you. We have found that technicians, and even end users have become VERY dependent on 3rd party applications and tools to fix issues and problems for them, but what do you do when a problem is outside of the scope of your utilities? These articles are designed to not only help you solve problems, but to show you how they start, and WHERE they start, and how to get to the roots of the real problems on your PC’s.

This portion will give you a little bit of a background on who I am and what I do, so you can kind of associate with me in these articles. I am going to go over a little bit of where most of my knowledge has come from and how I can help you. My name is Richard Correa III, and I have been a Systems and Network engineer for as long as I can remember. My first computer that I ever used was an Atari 800xl, which at 6 years old I learned to program in basic in the early 80’s and from then on I was hooked on computers. Of course I played with the Commodore 64s and Vic 20s, Tandy’s, and other Atari’s (ST Series), but my first real PC was an IBM XT 8086 running DOS 3.3 that my father brought home from work to code on. My father is a true low level Systems Analyst, and has been coding in low level Assembler and C for 30+ years. He is also a Kernel UNIX coder and now engineers RAID Data Recovery software for our firm. I have been fortunate to work in my industry my entire life and have been able to see the amazing growth of computer technology over the last 20 years. Shortly after I started using the IBM XT, I was introduced to the 80286 AT series and then the 80386×16 series. My first true networking experience came when the 386s came out. I setup my first Novell IPX/SPX Token Ring network at the age of 12 so that I could play Doom and Quake with friends and family head to head. I was always interested in communications and started my very first Wild Cat BBS (Bulletin Board System) shortly after my parents opened a retail computer store in 1995. BBS’s were the predecessor to email, forums, and messaging systems we know and now use. I learned about IRC (Internet Relay Chat) systems shortly after I started BBSing and that is was when I truly saw technology changing. IRC was the first system in which I was able to talk to thousands of people online at one time, and it was LIVE! From that point further, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and have been fortunate enough to grow with the technologies at hand, and have been teaching ever since.

In early 1999 I received my MCP, MCSA, MCSE, and MCDBA certifications to try and guarantee my place in the workforce, but I soon after found that companies were not only looking for certifications, but they also required years of field knowledge as well. In late 1999 I started working for a local IT Firm that installed High Speed Broadband for a major ISP and cable television company. I was a lead technical trainer there, and trained other technicians how to install network cards, setup home and small to medium business networks, and to show customers how to surf the Internet and use their computers safely. All of this technology was very new and EVERYONE wanted it. I left this firm shortly after and was offered a Director’s position at a much larger contracting firm who at the time had over 800 field engineers and technicians installing coaxial cable and large scale voice and data systems all over the state of Florida. I helped to implement all of the training and installation material to teach these 800 technicians how to use computers and integrate small scale networks. Within 2 years of being with this company I had trained over 2000 technicians and helped in becoming the largest contractor for Time Warner and Bright House Networks in the south east region. I published a lot of manuals and technical documentation that I am going to be posting in these Beginners Guides over the next few months, and I hope you can benefit from them as much as my technicians did. Please feel free to contact me anytime via phone or email with any questions or problems that you may have, no matter how large scale the problem may be. I love a good challenge and love to fix intricate problems.

The Internet Protocol TCP/IP and IP Addresses:

Have you ever wondered how the Internet works? Have you ever just been typing in a web address into your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) bar and wondered how your Internet browser knows where to go and get the information you are about to see on your screen? Well if so, here is a very basic introduction to the Internet and how it works.

Every computer, every server, every website, every router, and pretty much every network device uses something called a protocol to communicate between each other. A protocol is basically a common language that all of the network devices use to pass data and information back and forth. The protocol that the Internet uses to talk back and forth is TCP/IP v4 (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol version 4). TCP/IP Is bases on a 4 octet numbering system called an IP Address that we will not go too far into depths in this article, but this is an example of an IP Address (10.10.10.1). Understand that IP Addresses can range anywhere from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. An IP Address is a unique identifier for every Internet device, and can be looked at similarly to a house or business address. If I wanted to send you a letter via the postal service, I would have to know your address, and if you wanted to send me a return message, you would have to know my mail address. Now do you see the similarities? Everyone has two unique numbers assigned to them to make sure that the correct information gets to the correct person or computer. Everyone has an IP Address, and they have a MAC address. The MAC address is a serial number that EVERY networking card or device has that is a 12 digit alpha-numeric number that is NEVER duplicated by the manufacturers, making sure that with a proper IP Address the correct information has 2 layers of addressing to guarantee packets and traffic to the right computer.

The Domain Naming System (DNS):

So hopefully, you now understand that your computer has an IP Address that allows you to send packets of information back and forth to websites so that you can surf the Internet. You now have to wonder, how do I use my IP Address to get to www.google.com? When the Internet was first designed, it was never even conceived that it would scale and grow to the size that it has gotten to today. The original design for the Internet was made so that military bases could securely send data back and forth to each other and guarantee the packets were addressed to the correct places. Shortly afterward the School Board and Universities started designing their own network protocols and adopted TCP/IP as their own internal LAN / WAN (Local Area Network / Wide Area Network) network protocol as well. When the Internet was first designed, you had to know the IP Address of the server or site you were trying to communicate with, but this was quickly becoming a problem, because people were starting to be expected to know thousands of IP Address just to communicate. It would be like trying to memorize a phone book to place a call. So this is when the first versions and implementations of DNS were introduced.

DNS Is an overlying service that runs on top of TCP/IP called the Domain Naming System. DNS uses special DNS Server Database to translate Domain Names (Such as google.com) to an IP Addresses so that your computer knows where to go when you make a request in your browser. So when you type in http://www.google.com into your browser, the first thing your network card, IP Address, and browser do, is check with your ISPs (Internet Service Provider) DNS server to find out what www.google.com’s IP Address is. Your ISPs DNS server then sends your computer the IP Address you are looking for, and your browser then goes to the IP Address for requested websites (I.e. google.com) web server. Google’s Web Server then sends the web page to your browser in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) format, and your browser converts the HTML to the web pages that you see in your browser every day. Now understand that this is in all actuality MUCH more complicated, but this truly is the gist of it.

TCP/IP Is a very fast and seemingly secure layered protocol that has been suffice for 20 years now. The only problem is that the world and the Internet have outgrown this protocol, and we will most likely be seeing a newer, faster, more secure, and robust protocol in the next 10 years. Companies like AOL, Time Warner, and Microsoft are already testing a new version of TCP/IP named TCP/IP v6 (version 6) on their internal networks. TCP/IP v6 is supposedly going to be more secure, and also going to allow for more public IP Addresses, which is one of the major issues that TCP/IP v4 is running into now.

If you would like to get a more technical understanding of the 7 layers of TCP/IP and how it handles data packets, or you want to understand how DNS truly resolves name in its hierarchy, please look for future articles or send me an email and I will be more than happy to deliver some intricate documentation explaining these 2 amazing Internet back bone pieces.

Until Next time, take care, and please leave comments on any questions or inaccuracies that you may have found for this article.

Richard Correa, MCP, MCSA, MCSE, MCDBA
Senior Network Engineer / Lead Web Developer
DTIData – DTI Networks
Office :: 727.345.9665 ext.206
Mobile :: 727.656.8690
rcorrea@dtidata.com
http://www.dtidata.com
http://www.dtinetworking.com

The Black Art of Data Recovery: BIOS, MBR, VIRUS

Virus programmers, although destructive, were at one time some of the most innovative programmers in the industry. They exploited the very core of an operating system, and could do magic with the BIOS and MBR. The virus writer of present is just some hack script writer who has no understanding of the true nature of the relationship between the BIOS, and the MBR. These words try to shed some light on the boot up sequence, and the susceptibility we all share.

Over the years many things in the world of computers has changed. We have gone from command line, to GEM, to a windowed GUI type of operating system. A stick of memory used to be one hundred dollars for 1 MB, now its seventy five dollars for 1024 MB. A forty megabyte hard drive was $1000.00. Now you can get 750 gigabytes worth of hard drive for two hundred and fifty dollars. We have gone from 8 bit (XT), 16 bit (286) 32 bit (386), and finally 64 bit (EMT 64) central processing units.

With all of this obviously monumental progress, one of the most important functions of the computer has never changed. The boot sequence. Oh yes, it may have been enhanced, there may have been little items added here and there, but the focal point of the boot up process has never changed. Let’s take a quick look at the steps in booting a PC.

When you switch on your PC immediately the BIOS takes over. In its process it does what is called a POST (Power On Self Test). The POST is a set of diagnostics that will test the hardware of your computer. Examples would be memory, bus, CPU, ports, PCI bridge, and the like. Through the use of checksum, and data echoing the POST can tell if something is amiss in your hardware. If the POST finds something wrong, and considers it a fatal error, the boot process will be halted, and a series of beeps may be given. These beeps, depending upon the BIOS developer, will guide you in diagnosing your fatal error. The beeps are used because many times an error in the hardware will make it so the video cannot be used. The POST is much more comprehensive than is being presented here; however, this set of articles is about data recovery and not how to diagnose your POST process.

Master Boot Record

The BIOS has found a HDD that is in the list of bootable devices. The BIOS will then load the first sector of that HDD into memory. Just as a point reference a sector is defined as 512 bytes of data. So, once again, the sector is loaded into memory. You may ask yourself, “Self, where exactly in memory does the BIOS load the MBR?”. An excellent question! From nearly the beginning of the PC industry. From the dawn of the BIOS, it has been scribed by the ancients that the MBR will be loaded into memory location 0000:7C00. (Drum Roll, cut to Yul Brenner laughing maniacally shouting “So let it be written, so let it be done!”. He was a good Ramses but Charlton Heston was a great Moses!)

In addition, there are some BIOS’ that will perform a small test on the MBR to see if it is valid. The test is to make sure there is a 0×55, and a 0xAA in bytes 510, and 511 respectively. If those bytes are not present, some BIOS will stop the boot process for that HDD and continue onto an alternative device. If all devices fail, then an appropriate error message will be displayed.

Boot Failure: System Halted is the choice of Award BIOS. If , however, the MBR is loaded and passes all of the BIOS testing INT 0×19 is called and a jump to memory location 0000:7C00 is performed. There, control of the entire PC is passed to the MBR. Awesome!

Exchange Server Data Recovery Overview

I have been managing DTI Data Recovery’s Exchange Server Support Hotline for over 3 years now. I receive a lot of calls about a lot of different types of Exchange Server problems. We also have a detailed Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Blog that has a lot of information that is helpful to Exchange Administrators.

Exchange Server Disaster Recovery

Most times a problem with Exchange Server is fatal. If your Exchange EDB won’t mount or Exchange services won’t start, believe me, it is a disaster. I have written a few articles about the different types of Exchange problems and what you can do to resolve them.

Exchange Server Support Articles on this blog:

• ESEUTIL and ISINTEG for Data Recovery of Failed Exchange Server - this article is about ESEUTIL and ISINTEG, what they are and how they can help you in a disaster.
• Create a Clean PRIV PRIV1 EDB Database - here I explain how to set up a clean database without re-installing Exchange Server. Very helpful especially if you are doing a mailbox level restore.
• Exchange Server Dirty Shutdown - by far the most common unrecoverable scenario, the dirty shutdown often means restore from backup.
• Exchange Server Disaster Recovery - a general overview of our Exchange Disaster data recovery services.
• FREE Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Support - this article explains how and why DTI Data Recovery offers free exchange server support.
• Using EXMERGE to import PST files - A tutorial on how to use ex-merge to import either recovered or backed up PST files back into your Exchange Server.

If you require Exchange Support call: Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

BEFORE RUNNING ANY UTILITIES:
Make a copy of your priv.edb and log files (Exchange 5.5) or priv1.edb and stream files (Exchange 2000 or 2003) and pub.edb! We can recover your email if you make copies prior to running utilities. DO NOT run MS utilities!!!

We offer 24 hour Exchange Support at 727-251-2058.

Visit our main Exchange Server Data Recovery page for more information.

Exchange Server Support on Exchange Disaster Recovery Case Studies Blog:

• Microsoft’s Exchange Server Disaster Recovery Action Plan - this is an actual email sent from Microsoft to one of our customers. It is their disaster recovery plan laid out step by step using ESEUTIL and ISINTEG.
• Using Windows Native Backup For Exchange - John Best’s tutorial with graphics on how to use Native Backup to protect your EDB files. You can use this even if you already have another back up program. You can never have enough backup that is for sure!
• Restoring A Windows Native Backup Exchange Server - John goes on to explain how to restore the backup file in this article, you can’t have one without the other right?

I hope you find these articles useful in your Exchange Server adventures!

Hard Disk Recovery Blog

DTI Data Recovery also has another blog that you might not be aware of. I first started this blog before I knew about WordPress. It has a bunch of great articles that include tutorials and our data recovery software user guides. If you have hard drive recovery issues you might fond some solutions there.

Hard Disk Recovery Support Articles

Below is a table of contents for our most popular articles on the hard disk recovery blog:

• FREE NTFS Partition Repair Tool - the press release for the free partition repair tool that our chief data recovery software engineer Dick Correa wrote.
• Why Defrag Your Hard Drive - Jacqui Best tells us how and why to defrag your had drive regularly.
• How To Set Up Your Computer - another great article from Jacqui on the proper way to set up your computer to protect it and you from the evils of the Internet.
• DART NTFS Data Recovery Software - the press release and overview of Dick’s best data recovery software yet - DART. Download DART from the file recovery program page.

This is just a sample of the blog’s content. If you need hard drive support visit DTI’s Data Recovery Software Products that shows you your data before you buy it! All of our demo software is fully functional and allows you to save your scan so you won’t have to run the scan over again with the full version.

Extended Data Recovery Software Support:
8 AM to 11 PM EST 7days a week!

24 Hour Hard Drive Recovery & Server/RAID Recovery Hotline:
Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or direct 1-727-345-9665.

DTI Data are experts at hard disk recovery repair.

Hard Disk Data Recovery Overview

Hard Drive Recovery refers to the physical repair of storage media that uses platters and read write heads. A hard drive has many moving parts that can at anytime break down. While it is true we need to repair the disk, we would never want you to use it again after hard drive recovery.

Hard Drive Recovery

Sometimes a daunting task, hard drive recovery is best done within a clean room environment. It is not only dust that we must take of, but more importantly static discharge. Any type of outside influence can do more damage to the hard drive that already exists.

There are quite a few parts within a hard drive, many of them are moving pieces making the drive more susceptible to failure. The graphic below shows all the parts of the hard drive laid out:

Even though as you can see there are a lot of parts that can cause failure, most of the time it is the heads that fail. Here is a close-up of the heads and a platter:

Drives get shipped out with bad sectors, so that can be a problem, but we also run into quite a bit of spindle and platter issues. The larger the capacity the more data there is to be accessed, and the more work on the motor. While it is true we can completely replace the platters, see my wife Victoria’s post: Platter Replacement - Old News for more info, many times the problem is with the bearings. This is rampant in some laptop hard disks. Read Victoria’s post about Toshiba Laptop Bearing Problems for more information.

Here is an up close picture of the bearings:

The bottom line: if your hard drive is making any kinds of noise, see our post about Hard Drive Data Recovery that has sound clips of failing hard drives. Our contact info is below:

If you are here you need data recovery, more than likely, internal hard disk repair. Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form if you need hard drive recovery.

Hard Drive Data Recovery Backup Solutions

DTI Data performs hundreds of hard drive recovery cases every week. For the most part the unfortunate users did not back up their data and were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hard Drive Data Recovery is the actual restoration of data files off of a damaged hard disk.

If you are unsure of what backup solutions you need to avoid hard drive recovery check out some of our previous posts on backing up.

Backup Data And Avoid Hard Drive Recovery

Our head of hard drive data recovery support is Jacqui Best, and she has written a few great articles on data back up.

• External Hard Drive For Data Backup - in this post Jacqui goes into detail about what external USB drives are and how they can be used to avoid hard drive recovery.
• Test Your Back Up Plan - no one wants to need hard drive data recovery, and even though you might be diligent about backing up your data, read this post on how to check your backups and verify your data is safe.

I also wrote a couple of back up posts that talk about the different options available:

• Hard Disk and Tape Back Up Comparison - a lot of companies use tapes as back up, but are they as reliable as hard disk backups? Even though disk failure can lead to hard drive recovery, tapes aren’t the only solution.

The moral of this story is to backup your data so you don’t need us or hard drive recovery!

Next Page »