Are You Prepared For A Hard Drive Failure?

Have you ever experienced the feeling of a hard disk failure?

Have you ever witnessed boot failure when you lose precious data forever?

Over the world, one of the worst fears among most users appears when a hard disk failure occurs. A lot of valuable information is lost either at homes or corporate sectors. In this kind of critical situations, one thinks how to recover the data back? Well, there are some solutions applicable and would be discussed later.

But let's talk about the reasons why a hard disk fails in the first place?

The data can be revived in some cases depending upon the kind of damage caused. A number of factors can be responsible such as electronic and mechanical failure, firmware gets corrupt, or the logic fails. At times, these factors are collectively behind the loss of data from your hard drive. Bad sectors may be formed over a period of time and the information on those sectors becomes unreadable or is lost.

The data used for interaction between computer and hardware is called firmware. If this interaction data (firmware) gets corrupt or fails to perform its functions, the hard drive fails.

Regarding electronic failures, there is a controller board on hard disks that may get damaged due to electrical surge resulting in hard disk failure. There are number of software available usually used by data recovery experts who can recover the data lost in these cases. Even replacing the controller board with another one possesses risk as these boards are specific for each drive they come with.

Most fatal is the mechanical failure in which data recovery becomes much more difficult compared to the electronic one. In case of a mechanical failure the read/write head fails or it may get crashed. Head usually crashes when the computer is moved around or a physical shock occurs due to an electrical surge. Logical errors can also be causative factors of hard drive failure. These logical errors are separate from hardware components and occur if the firmware gets corrupt or there are excessive wrong entries in FAT (File Allocation Table).

In almost all situations, the data stored is of vital importance and you need to recover it. Data recovery experts should be contacted instantly in such cases to recover lost information. If the hard disk has failed because of viruses or improper software functions as mentioned earlier, the experts can help increase possibilities of recovery. Data on almost all the computer operating systems which may consist of versions of OS by Microsoft Windows, Linux/Unix, Novell, Macintosh and Apple Inc etc. on almost every file systems including FAT32, FAT, NTFS, NTFS5, HFS, HFS+, NWFS, EXT3 AND EXT2 can be recovered.

In order to recover the information the hard disk might be taken by the professionals to workshop and returned later. They have usually their own laboratories where can they test, repair and recover the lost data effectively.

You as a user would never want to lose your precious data so you have to assign a role to the recovery experts in such a situation. Information recovery experts also recover data from most of the important storage drives such as tape, DVD, CD and other relevant media. To avoid such a situation, you as a costumer should take precautionary measures like creating regular backups of necessary data every week or so. Some OS have backup programs already installed like Windows.

Other efficient software programs are also available for data backups in the market and can prevent you from such issues.

Another most important aspect of this problem is the loss of valuable time in resolving the complex problems. It could possibly a long procedure. I personally suggest you to reserve a second source of computer like a portable notebook so that you could be able to carryon in a disaster. You can always transfer the required information between them and would likely not fear hard drive failure anymore.