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Here
at www.mirandasbeach.com
we have had more than our fair share of hard disk failure and late nights
desperately trying to recover our data and we know that a bit of basic
simple advice is a good thing in these situations. -
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If it stops
one person putting a sledgehammer through the screen and guide them
through successful data recovery then we have done some good in this
brave new world ! But first - Four very IMPORTANT things 1. Remember Backups! this desperate data recovery stress all becomes a lot less important if you take regular backups, either to CDs, DVDs, other hard drives on the machine, networks or external, even Google or Yahoo, email etc. We currently use SyncToy which is great for keeping large folders backed up, coupled with manual backups over a network and also to the C: drive. DVD backups where appropriate and we do email important documents occasionally just in case. |
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2.
Think
about keeping your operating system on one drive (the C: drive) and your data
on one or more other drives.This is better than having the whole lot on one
drive which suffers the stress of having to zip around doing the system stuff
while also performing all the data functions. Dell ship their computer with
one massive drive and I think this is a big mistake. Split it out - you know
it makes sense.
3.
Regularly check to see if your drives need defragmenting -
to defragment in XP its as simple as Open My Computer. Right-click the local
disk volume that you want to defragment, and then click Properties, on the
Tools tab, click Defragment Now and Click Defragment. To check first go the
the Control Panel, click on Rearrange items on your hard disk to make programs
run faster, click on the drive and then click Analyze and it will do its thing
for a while and then tell you if your drive needs defragmenting. Watch out
! it takes ages to defragment a big drive so best to let it do it over night
while you are safely tucked up in bed dreaming of flying through clouds of
stable data and chickens.
4.
Use Power
Surge protection like a Belkin surge protector
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Now - it may be too late to take all that helpful advice right now, or you have been doing all that and you still have a hard disk failure. What we have learned is that there are really four basic ways that your drive can fail that will lead to a likely loss of your beloved data: |
Also you can
have the misfortune of getting a mix of more than one of these four types
of failure (yes I think we have had that too !) and c) above (logical corruption)
can easily be a knock on effect of one of the first three more basic failures.
To get to the nivarna of full data recovery is not always possible and depends
on the nature of exactly what has happened to the disk and what state it is
in.
Lets have a look at all this a bit closer:
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a) Some kind of damage or corruption of the firmware If you have the hard disk spinning up when powered on, but the computer incorrectly recognises it or does not recognise it at all, or it gets further but then just hangs during boot up, then you could have a firmware corruption problem. Both times we have had this we have got our data back after going to experts and I'm afraid an low level reprogramming expert could be the only way out for you here. |
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It cost us, and
we would not have bothered if we had been sensible and done our backing up
properly.
Hard disk
firmware is the software code that is embedded within the actual hard drive
hardware. The corruption of this firmware can make the hard disk unreadable
or the computer is unable to fully interact with the hard disk. We understand
that it is often the case that the data on the disk is fully recoverable because
an expert has a decent chance of being able to repair and reprogram the faulty
drive.
b) A basic electronic system failure.
Really here we are talking about power spikes or surges that affect the controller board of the hard disk. This then knocks out the hard disk and the BIOS has no idea it exists anymore. You will often see a burn if you take the drive out and have a look. You will here no spinnning at power on, the drive is effectively dead. Again, in our early days here at Mirandasbeach, before we were disciplined enough to back up religously and also to use decent surge protection, our house was hit by lightning and we lost a hard drive. I cannot remember now if we bothered to get the data back - I think we just fumed at the loss of hours of animation work, but we were skint and could not afford the data recovery charges at the time - this is something you have to weigh up, how many hours of work have you lost compared with the cost of recovery. If you can stomach the quotes then an expert data recovery company can often get your data back for you because it is the controller board that has been zapped and not your data and they have ways of bypassing the dead controller and copying out your precious life's work.
c) Mechanical Failure
Inside your hard disk
are small moving parts that can go wrong and fail. These mechanical failures
of hard disk components will often make the data on the hard drive inaccessible.
One common sympton is a regular clicking sound but you may hear and see nothing,
just sense that heart sinking, gut wrenching feeling of utter despair when
you realise that all your data has disappeared. But it may not be as bad as
you think, these types of mechanical failures are often salvagable but it
can come at a cost. The recovery of data from hard drives with mechanical
failure should be carried out in lab conditions known as a "clean room"
where the drive can be safely taken apart, poked around, investigated, and
fixed. Do not take a drive apart yourself, you'll do no good, unless you want
to cathartically wreck the beast. If you are thinking of using a data recovery
service ask them about their clean room first.
d) Logical Errors
What we mean here is for some reason your file system is up the creek. There is nothing physically wrong with the hard drive. Its like a software problem, not a hardware problem. But the effect can be the same i.e. you cannot get at your data. There is a better chance that you may be able to fix this without the help of a Data Recovery firm but there is also the risk that the logical problem is a symptom of a mechanical, electrical or firmware problem, so you could be wasting your time and making hings a whole lot worse. If your drive was severely fragmented, i.e. you had not been regularly defragmenting, then that may be the cause of you not being able to access your data. The drive has effectively given up and got itself in such a state that the underlying file syatem has become corrupt. Microsoft Scandisk, Chkdsk and Fsck utilities are there to try to find and fix logical errors. Here is how to run Scandisk on an XP machine:
1. Click on the Start
menu
2. Select My Computer
3. Next sse the right mouse button to select the C drive. Thisl makes a new
menu appear.
4. Select Properties
5. Then select the tools tab.
6. Under the error checking select check now.
7. A new screen will show up, one is to automatically fix file system errors
and the other is to scan for and detect problems with the hard drive. It is
recommended that you select them both.
8. Click Start
9. It is possible that it may prompt to have Scandisk run when the computer
is restarted, click YES when prompted,
10. It may be necessary to reboot your PC
Note:Scandisk takes a very long time to run, so be patient.
There are also literally thousands of software tools you can buy off the net, but pay attention, if you intend to run a fix utility on the faulty disk, we have been told (it has not actually happened to us) that it is possible to make recoverable data unrecoverable and that this is especially true when running ScanDisk and Chkdsk on a damaged hard drive. This may be a ruse by the data recovery companies to stop you fixing your problems yourself without spending wads of cash on their services - but you'll have to do more research on that - We honestly do not know if it is true.
Another thing that may be needed is a full reinstall or repair of the operating system. We had our XP PC blue screening and behaving very strangely and I thought it was a hard disk failure, I ended up reformatting the drive and reinstalling - a pain, but it worked, and I hadn't lost my data because I had all that on the D drive. I have also successfully run the XP repair from the original disk and got it to sort out what must have been logical errors.
Good luck, back up, and we hope it doesn't cost too much !!