Hard Drive Recovery – A Quick And Easy Guide
The Quickest Way Of Getting A Broken Hard Drive Back Up And Running
The sad fact is that even with the best of intentions; sooner or later you will have a hard drive failure. I have been through this scenario more than once and I can assure you it’s not much fun.
So where do you start with hard drive recovery? This really depends on the type of failure you are experiencing. The most common hard drive failure can be classed as either software or user error. A piece of software or user performs an action that renders the data on a hard drive either deleted or unreadable or even both. My tool of choice for this type of hard drive recovery is OnTrack Easy Hard Drive Recovery Professional. It costs around $500 but the results are well worth it, even a formatted hard drive is no problem for this quality software solution. When Norton removed my partition containing the family photographs I swear this software saved my marriage!
If you are only interested in recovering a few files from your hard drive then it may be worth trying one of the free recovery tools available such as FreeUndelete. These do work although it must be said their recovery algorithms are not as advanced as Easy Recovery. If it’s only a few non essential files then I would certainly try one of these first before splashing out. One thing worth mentioning is that it is vital for you to have another storage medium available for you to run your recovery tool from. Installing software to a drive you wish to recover files from will seriously reduce your chances of a full file recovery.
The software hard drive recovery options mentioned above are reliant on your PC being able to recognise your hard drive. If your PC doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of your hard drive then chances are you have the other type of hard drive failure – a hardware fault. Whether your heads have dropped or your drive just grinds away (or not at all), your options are limited. At this point it is going to cost serious money to perform your hard drive recovery, have a serious think about how essential that data is? OnTrack Easy Recovery has contact information for you to discuss sending of your hard drive. There are also many firms offering this service over the internet, you may even be able to find local IT providers offering hard drive recovery services. My advice would be to go with a big name with a big reputation. If your data is important enough for you to recover then it is important enough for you not to take any chances with non proven companies.
If there is one thing that hard drive failure ant attempted hard drive recovery has taught me it is this. Backup! You can buy an shed load of blank DVDs for the cost of hard drive recovery, trust me!