Why You Should Always Leave Data Recovery To The Experts

In recent times with the “Credit Crunch” beginning to bite a lot of people may well be tempted to try to repair or recover their data from a failed hard disk drive or memory stick. Alternatively they try to use recovery software, which is easily available on the net, can be paid for and downloaded online.

In most cases this software will be a data recovery programme for a hard disk drive that has suffered from some form of logical table corruption and will not assist with

  1. Mechanically failed devices
  2. Degraded hard Disk Drives
  3. Devices with electronic failures

This software will of course not be able to help and if the drive is degraded or suffering from a mechanical failure attempting to run this software will in most cases cause further damage to hard drives, potentially making the disk unrecoverable.

The software itself is very often very reasonable priced – usually under $100 but is only good for one purpose to recover either deleted or logically failed drives, so if you are not sure what you are doing trying to do a self recovery can in the long run cost a lot more.

In a recent case a teacher brought in a laptop hard disk drive which had been previously diagnosed by the schools own IT department. The teacher concerned had done exactly what any person probably would do and trusted that the onsite IT dept at the school would have a degree of knowledge and competence when dealing with a suspected HDD failure. Unfortunately the opposite seems to be the norm in many cases.

In a typical case a drive was initially presented for diagnosis and duly diagnosed with a blown PCB - the drive seemed completely dead and would not spin at all. As an additional test a new PCB was placed on the board so that the response of the heads could be tested. The result of the diagnosis was that the hard drive read heads had been damaged following a power spike.

Upon further discussion, with the client, it transpired that the IT dept had decided to remove the HDD from the laptop and as it was an IDE device mount it as an external storage device by using an IDE connector. Unfortunately they plugged the HDD to the connector “upside down” meaning that crucially the drive received a huge power spike through it when the connector was hooked up to a PC.

It may well have been in this particular scenario that the actual problem could have been no more a few bad sectors on the disk, however due to a certain level of incompetence within this department what originally was more than likely a simple job for a data professional turned into a much more costly full drive rebuild.

Many businesses need to get their data back as quickly as possibly so it is quite frustrating to have additional costs and additional downtime whilst you are waiting for data to be recovered

Sadly this is not an isolated case and data recovery companies the world over will have a whol;e collection of stories where simple recoveries were turned into data disasters by the DIY and have a go brigade

So the moral of this is that whilst many people will look for a quick and cheap fix for their data recovery problems, they really are best leaving it to the experts.


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