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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System Area Of The Hard Disk A Look At A Partition

So here is the deal, I would say in about 99 percent of the calls I take, I talk about the “System Area Of The Hard Drive” and I am sure that must seem like techno babble to most people. Because of the specialization of this field of technology,... 

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Remote Logical Hard Drive Recovery

I have over the past few years had customers with hard drives that I knew I could fix their problem easily if I just had access to the drive. In these situations I will usually offer the customer a logical recovery, which entails them sending us the hard... 

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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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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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Recovering from Accidental FDISK using Free Software

Like many of us I have accidentally used ‘fdisk’ to partition a drive that I had never intended to. Whether it be adding a new drive, repartitioning and formatting a USB device, or just trying to reload the operating system there has been... 

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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 enclosure... 

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Samsung Spinpoint Being Mass Produced

Last week Samsung announced that it will be mass producing their high capacity laptop hard drives. Their Spinpoint series has either high capacity or high speed, whichever is more important to the individual consumer. Some day soon they will have the... 

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