Failed Hard Drive Recovery From Stuck Heads

One of the most common problems facing computer users is a failed hard drive. We see all types of failed hard drives, but the most common fatal problem revolves around broken heads. If there are any issues with the platters, often times it will be the... 

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Western Digital My Book Problem Question and Answer

Below are some more fun Q&A about hard drive recovery. I have given what I think is the best solution to these problems. As always please leave a comment if you have a question or contact me directly at 727-345-9665 ext 236. Question: I have a 1TB... 

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Data Recovery Forum Questions Answered PST Recovery and Hard Drive Not Detected

So I trolled the Internet for topics to write about and found tons of forums with very good questions not being answered so I am going to post the questions and then give you the best possible answer I cam up with. Q: Yesterday I was cleaning out the... 

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What is a Hard Drive Boot Sector?

A common misunderstanding is that because a hard drive is not a boot drive it does not have or need a boot sector, this just isn’t the case. All DOS based (Windows) hard drives have a boot sector. It is often also confused with the MBR (Master Boot... 

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Damaged Hard Drive Recovery

When a hard drive is damaged it almost always comes down to one of two things that are wrong. Either the electronics are bad or the heads have failed. Damaged hard drive recovery involves repairing the parts that are broken and then accessing the data... 

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My Book is Not Being Seen by Windows

Ok so the most popular external drives on the market have to be the My Book and The Passport. I get a ton of calls every week about them, and I don’t believe it is because it is not a good product but more because they are being SO widely used.... 

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Hard Drive Recovery Myths Debunked

If you have had a hard drive problem then sure enough you have done some searching on the Internet and seen some startling revelations about hard drive recovery. My personal favorite is :it is safe to put your hard drive in the freezer over night”!... 

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Storage Wars – Hard Drives Reach 2TB – Good or Bad

Seagate Constellation 2TB And in this corner… The hard drive Storage Wars have been heating up lately as Western Digital and Seagate battle it out for not only the largest capacity disks, but they are also going green! Western Digital went as far... 

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How To Remove A Laptop Hard Drive

So here is a little tutorial on how to remove a laptop hard drive. I only have Dell’s in my little arsenal but the method should be the same across the board no matter what laptop you have. The only exception I will make that is with the dell I... 

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Hard Drive Form Factors Explained

This is the first article in a series that will explain how hard drives work, why they fail and what you as users can do to protect your data. When looking at hard drives the first step is to identify what it’s form factor is. Simply put, the form... 

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How platter swelling affects a hard drive

  Okay, I know this is not about how to read bad parity in a drive in order to find a the stale drive in an RAID five.  This is an important subject, however, I also think it is important to know why heat and a swelling platter can cause hard drive... 

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My Data Failure Nightmare, The Beginning

So here is the deal, recently I  have been having serious data issues. Like a bad dream it would seem I have lost my main data areas in three different machines in the last 4 months. On a side note one of the machines (my main one) lost its hard drive... 

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When good RAIDs Go Bad, A Technicians Worst Nightmare

The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data” area of the... 

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What File System Components are affected by FDISK

As I have mentioned before we have all either by design or by accident fdisked an NTFS file system. In doing so all of the files become inaccessible and the assumption for many years was that they could not be recovered. Many of the more recent pieces... 

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When My Main Gaming Machine Has Serious Hard Drive Crash

Ok so here is what I have, 3 broken machines, all with bad hard drives. I am not talking about a little logical damage to the drive where recovery is a possibility with software. Oh no these are full blow physical recoveries. In machine one I have a RAID... 

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Slave A Laptop Hard Drive To USB

This article and video will show you how to use a USB enclosure to slave a laptop hard drive. Many times laptop – notebook hard disk drives come in here that we are able to recover with data recovery software. This video will help you use a USB... 

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Recovering Data From A Laptop

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... 

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Hard Drive Recovery Software

There are a lot of websites and blogs that talk about hard drive recovery. Most of the content out there is really just fluff, written to drive hard drive and data recovery type ads in Google AdSense. These ads can make webmasters and site owners a lot... 

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Hard Drive Failure Data Recovery

When your hard drive fails it is more than likely a physical problem. In most cases noise will accompany hard drive failure, clicking and scraping are common sounds that a hard drive will emit while it is failing. It is important to back up all your files... 

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Hard Drive Recovery Techniques

Hard drive recovery is one part of the overall process of data recovery. Data recovery involves many steps that vary depending upon the actual circumstances of the hard drive failure. When the disk is physically damaged it will need to be repaired. This... 

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