The video below shows 2 things of importance when looking at failed hard drives, the initialization process that lets the heads know when they are ready to start scanning the drive, and a drive with stuck heads. Newer hard drives have built in safety mechanisms that stop the heads from scanning the platters.

Learn more about hard drive recovery.

Question:

I have a 1TB Western Digital My book Hard drive. When I plug it in to either the USB or FireWire ports the computer detects and the instillation wizard pops up.
I follow the wizard steps and it says “successfully installed” but I cannot find my hard drive.
-My USB drives all work and I have other hard drives on the computer
-It says “you may safely remove hardware” in the task bar
-I’ve tried it on a different computer and had the same result

Answer:

So this gets a little tricky because just because “My Computer” isn’t seeing the drive it does not mean the computer is not seeing the drive. You would need to go to disk management and then see if it is reporting as a mass storage device in the machine. If it is then it is likely that the drives problem is a MBR (master boot record/partition record) problem that can easily be fixed with something like a remote recovery. The other option is to run data recovery software on it and you should be able to tree the hard drive, move the files off, repartition/reformat, and move the data back. If it is not being seen in disk management then it is likely a communication problem with the USB enclosure (box holding the hard drive) and the computer. Usually popping the enclosure open and then slaving it or putting it in a new enclosure fixes that problem.

Question:

I bought a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1TB External Hard Drive in July ‘09. I moved ALL my music, photos and personal files onto this hard drive. My CD-ROM drives quit working right before I got this….so I had not gotten around to “backing them up” on discs. STUPID-I KNOW!!!!
2 weeks ago it just quit working. I used it in the morning and in the afternoon, it wouldn’t work. It appears that it isn’t getting any (sufficient) power. It does not show up as an available drive when it’s plugged in.
Is there ANY POSSIBLE way for me to get my files off of this thing? I plan on sending it in to get it warranted-but I want to recover my files first.

Answer:

Ok, so like the above user he eludes to the face that it just isn’t showing up. it really could be all of the above fixes. My guess would be that if he wanted to get permission from Western Digital to pop open the enclosure he would be able to rule out the insufficient power problem. My guess would again be that the chassis has gone bad since this a very common problem. I always say that a My Book is a good product but only if you are going to plug it in just to back up and then leave it off most times. If you want an external device you can run all the time the best course of action would be to buy a high end USB enclosure and a hard drive in the size you want and build your own. This will give you the option to install fans in it as well as be sure it has good power to the hard drive. Heat is one of the major causes of hard drive recovery.

Q: Yesterday I was cleaning out the rubbish from my PC, as it was getting a bit slow. Along the way I deleted an old user account folder from Documents and settings on my C drive.
Later that day I went to check my emails only to find my PST file was missing. at which point I remembered it was in the old user folder. I started looking for software to recover this file. The file is about 1GB and has lots of info that I need.

A: Their are a a bunch of schools of thought on this recovery method but generally they are all just that THOUGHT. You have to take into account a ton of different variables. The first being how much data was applied to the drive after he deleted the PST file. My guess would be a lot since he eludes to the fact the drive was full in the post. If the drive was being written to at all recovery options are dropped DRASTICALLY since the data is more then likely gone due to an over write. If there was no data put on the disk after he deleted it, then the best course of action would of course be an piece of software that could UNDELETE the file. As a last ditch effort I would sometimes recommend that the customer try some for of raw file harvesting but the drive will have to been defragged on a regular basis other wise the file will be all over the hard drive and the harvester will not be able to locate all of the pieces.

Q: I got an old Dell Dimension 3000 laying in pieces on my hardwood floor… and I can get other hard drives to read in it, even get an operating system to boot, and such. No issues.. But when I try to put this… Seagate Barracuda 7200.9
160GB hard drive in, it will not detect it, at all. Pulled up the bios, planning on inputting everything manually into it… But I can’t seem to find the option to do it… I can change the “Master drive” from … “Auto” to “Off” and that’s it.
I’m curious if there’s a way to know if the bios is compatible with this hard drive… if there’s a way to find out if it is, or isn’t.. Or just something I’m completely lacking intelligence on figuring this thing out. Seriously need this computer up with this hard drive. I can still access the drive from my computer… But I’m worried that if the HD Is infected.. IF it would infect my other HD’s… and I don’t want that to happen. I currently run No anti virus. I tend to avoid virus’s pretty easily, and very rarely actually get hit with them. and when I do, it’s usually pretty simple for me to remove them because I catch them pretty instantly..

A: So here is the deal this is a boot drive from another computer, slaving it into the machine COULD be causing some kind of “which drive should boot” conflict. The second problem he could have is that the bios is too old to see the drive, that it doesn’t support LBA mode or something strange like that. My personal recommendation would be to pull the drive out and get yourself a USB enclosure this will take all of those other issues out of the equation and then you can just deal with the OS seeing it which will make things much easier. It is a trick we use as a data recovery company when either Windows is having trouble booting with a certain drive in it or when we can not get the bios to see a drive.

The <NAME OF FILESYSTEM> Boot Sector is its official name and is the sector that holds the information on where the master file table or the FAT start on the drive. It also tells us important information like how big this particular partition is and where this partition starts. The really awesome part of the boot sector is that it keeps a back up of itself. The backup can be found at the end of the partition.

Ok so here is a boot sector, we can tell it is the boot sector because it of the NTFS in the upper left and side of the text side of my hex editor. When using a Hex editor/viewer it is also a good idea to make sure you have the 55 AA in the lower right hand corner of the HEX. Most HEX editor have a way for you to Apply and template to a boot sector so that you can view it as something you can understand and change.

This is the boot sector in a more readable format. You can see the important notes like the file system, hidden sectors (often call the offset). You can see the total sectors which gives us the total size of this particular partition if we take that number and divide it by 2097852 (which is how many sectors in 1 gigabyte). Also see that it has the starting MFT cluster, which is important because this is where the MFT starts. We can figure out where that is on the hard drive by taking that number and x by the sectors per cluster and then adding the offset. When I try to explain the boot sector to customers I use the analogy of  a car the MBR is the key that starts everything off but the boot sector is the like the engine it gets you where your going and does all the heavy lifting. I can usually repair a boot sector even when the backup boot sector have been lost with our remote data recovery service. If your hard drive is clicking or not seen by anything, you need hard drive recovery.

Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 if you need help!

Parts for Fixing Damaged Harddrive Recovery

Techniques Used To Repair Damaged Hard Drives

While it is true there are a lot of articles around the Internet on how to fix a damaged hard drive, most of them are very dangerous if you actually care about your data. There are actually videos out there that tell you to whack your hard drive or use a screwdriver to get the platters and heads unstuck. Below I put in a tongue in cheek version of a hard drive repair video That is amusing, but still not too far from some of the other stuff I have seen online!

For the most part a damaged hard drive MUST be opened in a clean room to protect not only from dust, but from magnetic and static discharges. Anything else is putting your data at a great risk! Visit our main site if you have questions about hard drive recovery.

In the case of the MY BOOK I recommend that the customer open up the chassis that is holding the hard drive and pull the drive out of it. Now I am going to preface this with saying it is highly likely this will void your warranty with WD, but it can allow you to gain access to your data. Once you open the chassis you and have the hard drive out you can then either put it in another chassis or slave it directly into the machine. Either option will give you the answer you are looking for, which is , is the drive bad or was it just the chassis. In A LOT of cases it is just the chassis. When we buy one of these devices we are paying for the hard drive and not a lot of extra cash goes into the making of the chassis.

Now in the case of the Passport, these are laptop drives inside of little chassis so you will either need special cables to convert down the size of everything in your desktop machine or to buy a chassis that supports laptop drives. These chassis can be picked up for very reasonable pricing at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CompUSA, Etc. Again opening the Passport will leave you not having a warranty on the device any longer. If your Western Digital external disk is making noises you my need hard drive recovery.

Expanding or compressing platters is not a good idea since the heads are programmed to search for the first sector of a hard drive in a particular place. The larger the capacity of the hard drive, the smaller that sector is physically. While it is true that older drives that were prone to get locked up due to heat, could benefit by being cooled down, that is just not the case with hard drives that have been manufactured in the last 5 to 6 years.

Speaking of older hard drives, that brings us to the second most popular myth about hard drive recovery which states that you can easily swap a damaged circuit board from 1 hard drive of the same model to another of the same model. Again that might have been true of Quantum hard drives 10 years ago, but don’t try it now! A good example of why that doesn’t work is just about any popular Western Digital hard drive. You can take any mass produced model number and search for revisions. You will find that the average WD hard drive model has at least 6 or 7 revisions. Each revision speaks a different language! OK maybe language is too strong a word, but dialect isn’t. They just don’t understand each other when you put a board that has one version of firmware on it and have that try to communicate with a head assembly that has another firmware imprinted on its chip sets. Companies that perform hard drive recovery these days must be able to heat boards and work on chips if they are going to have any hope of repairing electronic problems.

The final myth we are going to look at today I like to call hammer logic. One time long ago I was an electrical contractor and my answer to a lot of problems involved a hammer or using my Kliens as a hammer. Older hard drives used to get locked up and have issues with their bearings. A light tap with a baltine hammer could in some cases unlock the bearings and possible get the motor to spin properly and at the right speed. A hard drive’s motor is intrinsic to the system that makes a magnetic media device like a hard drive work at all.

Hard drives spin at a specific RPM which insures that the heads float just barely above the platters so that they can read the sectors according to the predefined sector map and either read or write your data. Either way, the motor must spin at the right RPM or very bad things will happen. We have been able to resolve quite a few issues when it comes to hard drive recovery involving bad bearings, and one of them involve a hammer. In modern hard drives, any deviation of a micro-millimeter can cause the sectors to move and then be unreadable by the heads. This is even more true in large capacity hard drives that employ perpendicular recording, a sector mapping system that upends the sector at a 90 degree angle making the readable surface of a sector microscopic in size. Hitting these sensitive devices with a hammer is a bad idea.

If your hard drive is making clicking noises, whining or has just plain died, the best thing to do is contact a real hard drive recovery company like us!

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 as to name it’s new 2TB hard drive the  Caviar Green series. Before I get into how 2TB hard drives work and why buyers should beware, let’s look at how a hard drive can be green. Western Digital has slowed the RPM’s down to 5400 on their Caviar Green, hoping to reduce heat and power consumption, without users noticing the drastic drop in speed. While Western Digital is by far the leader in high capacity storage for consumers, Seagate is also dipping their feet in by offering their 2tb drive as SATA, not just SAS. For those of you unsure about SAS and SAS 2.0, it is meant for enterprise level storage needs, not Joe Public. Western Digital has their 2TB hard drives going out as OEM as well as offering the drive in their online store. They also have a 2 hard drive 2TB My Book out that offers protection in the form of a RAID 1 mirror.

The 2tb My Book is priced to sell with a tag under $300.00. In fact it is really a two drives for the price of one situation since the OEM Caviar Green is $280.00 for just one hard drive. This is kind of confusing since I don’t see how they can sell 2 hard drives for the cost of a single internal 2tb drive. If you add up the speed slow down of 5,400 RPM along with its USB interface, this drive is OK for backup, but just won’t cut it for users planning to actively store and watch movies or listen to music.

Why 2TB Hard Drives Scare IT Professionals

Both Western Digital and Seagate have released 2TB hard drives this year. Even though the physical size of the drives remain at 3.5 inches, they are holding quite a bit more data. How did they pull that off? A couple of  years back, Toshiba released information about perpendicular recording as a new technology for traditional magnetic storage, but it was Seagate that delivered the first drive to consumers.

Perpendicular recording significantly increases the areal density and storage capacity of hard drives. The ones and zeroes are now stored vertically rather than horizontally. This allows for much greater storage because a sector can hold the same amount of data, but in a much smaller sector size. For example, if a platter can hold 100 sectors with longitudinal recording it will be able to hold 250 sectors with perpendicular recording. Using this technology and other advancements, hard drive manufacturers can now have areal density up to 500GB per platter. A 2TB hard drive will have four platters that hold 500GB each.

The problem here is that this type of areal density squeezes more and more bytes into sectors making them smaller and smaller. The heads have to be perfectly aligned to read and write to the sectors correctly, and more importantly read and write to those sectors on a consistent basis. If the heads write to the sectors even a hair out of alignment, then that data will be corrupt. If this happens over and over again, soon the OS won’t load and the computer won’t boot. If that doesn’t sound bad enough, the level of heat the motor generates to spin 4 platters, will swell the platters and the same problem happens – the sectors get out of whack and data gets corrupt. There is an old Latin phrase Caveat Emptor that means “buyer beware”. I bring this up not to criticize Western Digital and Seagate or their ability to make hard drives, but  to warn our readers about high capacity hard drives and to ask you all to take a wait and see attitude beofre plunging in and getting another drive because it is new. As owners of Seagate’s 7200-11 series drives found out to their misfortune, new technology often needs to be tested thoroughly before being released en-masse! If you do take the plunge and go for a 2TB hard drive, you better get 2 and use them to back each other up. If you have a 2TB disk failure you will need hard drive recovery so back up!

For this job you will need a clear space to work in, not a HUGE amount of space but enough that you can set your laptop down and have a good 4 inches all the way around. You will also need somewhere to set the hard drive once removed, aluminum foil makes a nice anti static surface. Also it is likely you will need a precision Phillips head screw driver, because like everything else on a laptop the screws are much smaller then that of a desktop. The screw drive will look something like this.

This is the bottom of my laptop, from here I need to look around and locate the SMALL screws I will need to remove to free the hard drive from the laptop.

They can “usually” be identified by the universal sign for Hard Drive which I have a picture of below.

From here you will need to remove the screws.

As you can see there is quite a few screws on the back, make sure you are removing the proper ones. If you are not sure you can always check with the manufacturers web site.

Once the screws are removed then you will have access to the hard drive, if it is the slider type you should be able to easily slide the drive away from the laptop. If it is the kind with a plastic cover over it you will have to disconnect the IDE cable or SATA cable and power. You should now be able to either do hard drive recovery on the laptop drive with an external USB chassis or replace the hard drive if that is what you were trying to do.

Related Hard Drive Recovery Resources:

How To Slave A Laptop Hard Drive Using a USB Enclosure Video - if you are removing your laptop hard drive for data recovery, this video will show you how to use the adapter for USB.

Hard Drive Recovery

The most common type of hard drive form factor is 3.5 inch for desktop disks. Laptop hard drives are almost alwas 2.5 inch form factor. Almost all computers manufactored today for consumers and small businesses have either IDE or SATA hard drives with a normal 3.5 or 2.5 inch form factor.

Why Is a 3.5 Inch Hard Drive Form Factor actually 4 inches wide

The 3.5 inch form factor doesn’t actually refer to the physical measurement of width or height of the drive, but refers to what the size of the bay is on the computer. Originally the 3.5 inch form factor was used in reference to the size of the PC’s floppy drive. Today hard drives are typically smaller than their counterparts from 5 years ago.

Watch the video below for a visual guide to common hard drive form factors:

Laptop hard drives are 2.5 inch form factors and like desktop disks, can be either IDE or SATA. The video above shows the difference between the cables and power connections on the two types of hard drives. Today there is also a significant difference in hard drive pricing when it comes to SATA and IDE. When looking at hard drive recovery, we don’t charge more for one or the other.

  In its simplest explanation a hard drive works much like the old phonograph record players.  The record would be placed on a spindle and a needle that is on the end of a tone arm would be placed on the record.  The needle reads the recorded music from the record and transfers that data to the amplifying device.  Now that being said how is a hard drive like a phonograph record? 

  A hard drive has a platter or set of platters that are similar to the vinyl record.  These platters are mounted on a spindle. There is also a ‘tone arm’ only on a hard drive it is called an actuator arm.  At the end of the actuator arm is a set of heads which are comparable to the phonograph needle.  This is a basic description of a hard drive, however, there is one huge difference in functionality.

  On a phonograph record the needle sits ON the record.  With a hard drive the needle floats on a cushion of air over the platters.  Since this is the technology used then it is important that the heads remain at a constant distance from the platters.  When a head reads a hard drive it doesn’t send a single beam to the hard drive to read it.  The signal looks like a cone and the farther the head gets from the drive the wider the cone is.  Conversely, the closer the to the platter the more compressed the cone is. 

  With this being said, each track on a hard drive is basically equidistant from each other.  So, if the head is the correct distance from the platter then the head will read only that track.  However, if the head is too far away it will read multiple tracks, this is called over-scan.  If the heads are too close only part of the track will be read, this is called under-scan.  As an example imagine a paint sprayer and you are spraying a picket fence.  Each slat on the picket fence is a different color.  Now, if you hold the paint gun (head) too far away from the fence (platter) it will spray the neighboring slats (tracks).  On the other hand, if the paint gun is too close you only spray part of the slat.

  With these facts here is why platter swelling is bad.  A platter is not completely flat.  Microscopically there are many flaws in a platter, however, because the heads float on a cushion of air the imperfections do not affect the physics of the read.  If, however, the platter swells then the imperfections become accentuated and the cushion of air can no longer compensate.  In many cases the platter imperfection can become so large that it exceeds the distance of the air cushion and actually touches the head.  This is called a head crash and can scratch the platter, damage the head and wreak all kinds havoc with a hard drive.

  If your computer is in a room that exceeds eighty degrees then that could cause platter swelling.  If your tower is inside of a desk and the air flow is restricted that will cause platter swelling.  If there is dust in your tower then that restricts airflow and can cause platter swelling. 

  So keep your tower dust free, keep your computer room cool, and keep the tower in an area with good air flow.

  Well, now that I got that off of my  technical chest hopefully next time I will cover the the mechanics of finding a stale drive in your RAID five.

  Until next time…
For more info on hard drive recovery

I then thought that maybe I have a power supply problem, that maybe there just isn’t enough juice to run what I want to run in my computer. So I take a look at my main machines power supply, it is an Antec True Power Trio 650 watt output. Yeah I am thinking the power supply is NOT the problem. Plus I have the 2 other machines that have hard drives that have failed. One of the machines is a server which will no longer allow access to the RAID 5 in it. The other machine is my “work” computer; I use it for emailing our clients, and keeping all my data recovery software tools on it. Fortunately, I work for a hard drive recovery company!

So I reboot the server and when it starts to come up I have a message that the array is in critical state and that one of the drives has dropped out. Now note that this is a common problem with this array, so I just figure I will go into Windows Sever 2003 and add the drive back in, no problem. WRONG, the drive can’t be added back in, so now I am sitting with an array I can’t get to and all the data I have ever had on it. (That’s right I didn’t back up) I eventually have to take it to our RAID guy Dick Correa, and have him fix it for me. He had to pull one of the drives because it was physically gone.

He then had to de-stripe them, then harvest all of my data off, and put it all on a 500 gig external for me. It was a Maxtor 200gb IDE drive, and all the others drives in the array are the same so all that I can guess is that I am just having total bad luck. That drive model is known to be pretty stable and all the other drives in the array are still in good working condition.

Data recovery software has evolved into moving data from the problem drive and placing it on a new drive. The setup for this type of recovery is at best tedious and in some cases can make the current file system problem worse. The first pieces of data recovery I designed and programmed would boot into a DOS prompt from a floppy. Residing on the floppy was the software, and the technician would either execute the software from a command prompt or the AUTOEXEC.BAT file would have an auto-boot of the ‘exe’ in its script. Once the software was online there were many tools that a technician could use to diagnose a file system problem. To this day there are many old pieces of my DOS software that technicians are using to recover a file system.

What made the software great was the fact that it fixed the file system on the drive that contained the damaged file system. In other words, you didn’t have to buy another drive, mount it, install an OS on it, download software to it. Take the damaged file system drive put it in a USB device and mount it. Then run the software on the damaged file system from the newly installed drive. Then move the data from the bad drive to the good drive. There are also times when there may be so much data to recover that a third drive is brought into the picture as a destination drive for the data.

Why go through all of this kind of trouble? Why write software that would make an end-user go through these types of machinations in order to bring a possible simple fix online? The data recovery software industry moved in this direction because most of the people buying the software were no longer technicians, they were end users. The Internet made everyone a ‘do-it-yourself’ data recovery guru. The end user thought you could buy apiece of software and become ‘JOE TECH’ and fix their problems themselves. Well, they found out quickly that if they misdiagnosed the problem the software that I was writing would wreak havoc on a file system making the problem much worse. So instead of educating the end user and making them take the drive to a trained and qualified data recovery specialist, we wrote software that protected the problem drive. Mores the pity.

Wow, did I get on my soapbox or what? Well, I have exceeded my total blog words for the week on this particular subject. Next week I will show an MBR that is in service, and then I will use fdisk to whack the partition and discuss the file system components affected.

Until next time…

Read How to use FREE software to recover from fdisk

Check out our data recovery software

Learn more aout Hard Drive Recovery

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 0, running 2 Seagate 80gb SATA drives. This machine is the one that continued to fail over and over. What I did to eventually to stop the madness was to NOT set it up as an array. What is strange to me is that one of the drives in the array (all three times) were physically gone, and when I say gone I mean gone, clicking, screeching, and knocking; really the whole enchilada. I am not sure if it is the MSI on-board Intel controller that was causing the problem or if it is really poorly made hard drives.

Every time I got the same hard drives, although with the 4^th batch of drives I did notice that the revision number was different. Maybe the drive manufacturer finally found whatever was causing the drives o fail like that and fixed it? Either way I am sitting on 3 months of running solid with these drives. The problem I have now is that 80 gigs just aren’t big enough for everything I have installed on the machine. A lot of programs out there do not like to be installed on anything but the “c” partition. I can see having to upgrade the drive very soon, which with all the OS reloading I have had to do lately doesn’t appeal to me at all. If this sounds familair to you find out more about hard drive recovery.

Hard Drive Recovery Video Series – How To Slave a Laptop Hard Drive

If you have a clicking hard disk drive chances are you need hard drive recovery and slaving your laptop will not help you get your files back. This method is for hard drives that are still recognized by the BIOS, they just don’t show you your data, or let you access it.

The software that you need to recover your data is dependent upon the Operating System that was on your laptop.

• For Windows XP or Microsoft Vista with NTFS File System use DART XP – this program will scan your laptop drive and show you the files that can be recovered before you actually buy the software. You can download the demo version for FREE without having to sign up for anything. DART XP Data Recovery Software. If the scan shows you the data you want, you can purchase it right through the software interface.
• For All other types of Windows or for external hard drives that are running NTFS, FAT, FAT 32 or FAT 16 you will need Recover It All. The Demo version also is FREE and will show you the data before you buy it. You can save the scan and purchase the sofrtware off of our website. Like all our products you don’t have to register it to get the demo and will receive the full version within seconds of purchasing it. Click here for the demo of Recover It All Data Recovery Software.

All of our data recovery software is guaranteed to work or you get your money back. Just like our data recovery services which are No Fix No Fee, we will show you your data before you buy!

DTI also has extended software support. Our software support people work right here in Florida. We don’t outsource anything ever! Our support phones are answered from 9 AM EST to 10 PM EST at 727-345-9665, if you are calling after normal business hours choose the software tech support option with your phone.

Remember if you need hard drive recovery DTI has the best support in the business, a class 100 clean room and a strict no data no charge policy on hard drive recovery. When it comes to laptop data recovery, DTI Data is second to none!

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!

The Hard Drive Recovery Process

Hard drive recovery is the process of recovering data from a physically damaged hard disk. More than half of the drives we receive have head failures which require that the drive is opened inside our clean room which prevents dust particles from damaging the drive further. The clean room is also used to protect the electronic parts of the drive from static discharge. Opening a hard drive in anything but a clean room is dangerous to the hard drive. Below is a diagram that shows the parts in a hard drive.

DTI Data Recovery is one of a handful of data recovery companies that have both a clean room AND engineers that are capable of programming software that is needed to repair a file system. The head of our programming department, Dick Correa, has been writing file system repair and data recovery software for many years. His technicians are constantly doing research and development on how to work with all file systems, not just NTFS. By combining advanced programming and having the tools necessary to perform hard drive recovery, DTI is an industry leader in data recovery services.

The reason that we are getting into all of this now is to help users identify legitimate resources when their hard drives have failed. Don’t trust just anyone with your data. Make sure the company you choose is like DTI Data, that they have a clean room and qualified engineers to perform hard drive recovery.

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 Recovery From A Failed Disk

When a hard drive fails, it needs to be repaired so the data can be transferred to stable media and the files can be recovered. Hard drive recovery is the process of repairing a failed hard drive. After the data is transferred, the data recovery process begins.

Hard Drive Recovery Techniques: The Clean Room

When performing hard drive recovery, it is absolutely imperative that the repair take place in a clean room. Static discharge and dust can have adverse effects on both the heads and the platters. The picture below shows the parts we are talking about:

Depending upon the cause of the initial hard drive failure, the engineers will repair the electronics or hardware.

Hard Drive Recovery Technique: Head Replacement

One of the most common hard drive recovery scenarios involves a clicking hard drive you can hear an example here. The clicking is most likely a head failure. The repair of the heads usually entails replacing them from a good hard drive of the same exact model. Once the heads have been replaced, the engineers move on to reading the disks and moving the data off to stable media.

These are just a couple of techniques the engineers at DTI Data use when doing hard drive recovery. Feel free to call us Call Toll Free: 1-866-438-6932 or fill out an online quote form for immediate support.

Heat Related Hard Drive Recovery

With a desktop computer you can add fans inside the box as well as right on the hard drive itself. You have no such luxury with laptop computers. The thing to do with a notebook is to keep the air flowing around it. Don’t use it while it is laying on a bed for example. There are laptop fans that you can buy for your desk if you have a dedicated workstation for your notebook. With the powerful options now available in laptops more and more people are using them as their primary computers, even companies. If a notebook is your main machine, keep it cool and avoid overheating.

For those of us that need the computing power that you can only get from a desktop, we do have options for keeping the system cool. Most new computers have advanced cooling options and these are just as important as duel core processors and gigs of RAM. Spend the extra dough and get as much cooling as you can when you configure your new computer.

The picture below is a typical computer cabinet desk combo. While it looks good and keep everything organized, it is a computer killer.

By squeezing your computer into a tight space you are stopping any air flow. Computers, like people need to breathe and stay cool. If you are looking at computer desks or furniture, make sure your computer has plenty of breathing room and air flow.  Heat is a major cause of hard drive recovery, so do everything you can to keep your drive and computer cool.

You can read the whole story at the Roanoke Times website. Dave goes on to explain how we recover data from water damaged hard drives and recommends that the police keep the drive submersed until we can get out hands on it. Since DTI is a certified forensic data recovery company with unsurpassed experience at water damaged hard drive recovery, who else are they gonna call?

If you are having hard disk problems than give us a call, no one has a better hard drive recovery success rate than DTI.

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

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

Hard Drive Recovery From Power Surges

When a computer is subjected to a power surge many bad things can happen. The first target is the power supply. Not able to sustain more voltage than it was designed for, the internal electronics will fry. While any boards that are plugged into the motherboard are likely victims, devices that are plugged directly into the power supply usually are the worst hit by a surge. When a surged disk comes in for hard drive recovery often times the electronics are fused together making the pcb board unusable. The hard part is to isolate those electronics and replace the chipsets to not only power up the drive motor, but to obtain communication between the electronics and the platters.

It is almost impossible to replace pcb boards due to the proprietary microcode and encryption that is prevalent on newer drives. That means that the hard drive recovery process is going to require advanced electronic work including soldering and un-soldering effected chips.

The best way for you to avoid this type of failure is to purchase a solid surge suppressor. There are plenty of power strips for sale that offer surge suppression, but you have to be careful to buy one that can handle at least 3800 joules.

Hard Drive Recovery Power Outages Failures Brown Outs

Almost as bad as a surge. a power failure can also cause quite a bit of damage to both your computer and your hard drive. A computer that gets shut down without proper sequencing can cause damage not only to the mechanical hard drive, but to the data on that disk. Most programs can’t restore from a dirty shutdown, or be rebuilt from a power outage. Another physical hard drive recovery issue from power outages is within the electronics within the disk. Power supplies send out an expected amount of voltage to the hard drive. Insufficient amount of power can cause the motor speed to fluctuate and sectors to be damaged.

A sudden stoppage of the hard drive without proper shut down could cause the heads to crash on the platters which damages the heads or worse, scratches the platters. This will lead to a clicking hard drive and data loss.

The best thing you can do is to buy a battery backup. A 600W 1 hour battery backup will keep your computer and monitor running long enough for you to institute proper shutdown. This can save you a lot of heartache and ultimately hard drive recovery!

Hard Drive Recovery Case Studies Explained

The case studies will be in a specific format that will outline everything from computer make and model, operating system and hardware configuration to hard drive type, capacity and manufacturer. By sharing our recovery experience with our readers DTI Data will continue its unique free support policy.

If there are any specific topics that anyone would like explored or if anybody has questions pertaining to hard drive recovery, please leave comments in this post and we will answer all questions and use your input in the creation of our content plan.

For those of you that are new to our site, DTI Data is a full service data recovery company. We operate a class 100 clean room where we perform all hard drive repair. All the software we sell on our website was created in house by our own engineers and programmers. DTI also has a full service network division that specializes in Exchange Server and database data recovery. We are certified to perform forensic data recovery and have biometric security to insure the confidentiality of our clients data.

By working with our engineers, technicians, programmers and sales staff I plan on providing the most useful information about hard drive recovery to be found online. Please leave a comment on this post if there is anything at all you are interested in learning about hard drive recovery.

Looking Back On Katrina Water Damaged Hard Drive Data Recovery

Flood damaged hard drives are among the toughest hard drive recovery cases we receive. DTI has proprietary measures we take that are unique in the industry. Living and working where we do, we have all felt the damage from water. Jacqui Best our support manager just had her house flooded not even two weeks ago! Sure FLorida is a great place to live, but we all get a little nervous this time of year.

Malcolm our head data recovery engineer sent a few pictures from the latest hard drive from Katrina. Here are hard drive parts from the water damaged hard disk:

The next shot of the water damaged hard drive is a close up of the platters:

We could tell when we opened the box that this was going to be a tough hard drive recovery. Here is a shot of the hard drive when we first opened the box:

Almost every flood damaged hard disk drive we receive for recovery has major corrosion. One of the top priorities is to stop the corrosion and get the drive platters into a recoverable state. We use special environmentally safe chemicals that help the process. Here is an example of the type of corrosion common on a water damaged hard drive:

The final picture shows typical corrosion focused on the back of the hard drive this time:

Even with all of these obstacles, DTI was able to recover this persons data! Call us if you have any questions:

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

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

Below is a New Orleans TV Station that won an award for their interview with the owner of DTI, Dave Mohyla. Visit Our Hurricane Data Recovery Page for the entire interview.