Don't Panic! How to Recover Data From a Dead Hard Drive

If the components in your drive are still functioning, you can recover the data yourself. If there's mechanical damage, send it to the pros. PM's complete guide to getting your files back.

 

 

Let's dispense with the I-told-you-sos. If you find yourself facing a data recovery job, then you have probably forgotten the cardinal rule of computing: All hard drives eventually fail. And you didn't back up your data, did you? We've been there—hey, everybody has to learn this lesson once. Now what?

Panic!

Just kidding. Actually, the first thing to do is determine if it really is a hard-drive failure you're confronting, and not one of the countless other equipment glitches that can cause a boot failure. If you have access to another computer, remove the failed hard drive from your sick PC, and hook it up as a secondary drive to the alternate computer. The easiest way to do this is through a USB universal drive adapter—it costs about $30 and is a good device to have around for all sorts of hard-drive diagnostics.

On a Mac, the process is a bit simpler. Use a FireWire cable to hook your nonworking Mac to a working Mac, then, "target boot" the nonworking machine by holding down the T key as you power it on. With either method, it's possible that your failed hard drive will show up on your healthy computer and reveal its files, in which case your hard drive is probably fine, but your operating system needs to be reinstalled. (Don't forget to offload your files before you do that.)

An attempt to salvage your data can cost anywhere from a hundred dollars to several thousand

If your files don't show up on the secondary computer, then you are at one of those pivotal moments in life when you find out how much your hard work and treasured memories are really worth to you. Depending on how your drive is damaged, an attempt to salvage your data can cost anywhere from a hundred dollars to several thousand. What's more, the process can take days—and there is no guarantee that the money and time you invest will produce any results whatsoever.

Now that we've gone through the depressing task of properly setting your expectations, here's the good news: Very often, the data on failed drives is recoverable. In fact, it's surprising how resilient that information can be—just ask any corporate embezzler who thought he had deleted all the evidence from his PC, only to have it show up later in court. The comparison is apt, since the very same computer forensic tools that uncover digital misdeeds are the ones that can find your treasured family photos.

There are two ways that drives crash: Logical failure and mechanical failure. In a logical failure, the drive's components are physically undamaged, but because of either accidental formatting or a corrupt file system, the drive is not able to find and navigate its own data. However, unless it has been overwritten, that data still exists on your drive.

There are two ways that drives crash: Logical failure and mechanical failure

A mechanical failure means that your drive has broken parts that are preventing it from working—busted drives often make a telltale clicking sound as they futilely attempt to access their files. If you hear that, your data may still be there, but you're not getting it back without calling in the experts (see "Worst-Case Scenario," next page). And those experts make good money. Data recovery services from Kroll Ontrack, Seagate's i365 and Iomega charge between $500 and $2500 to attempt to salvage data from either logical or mechanical disasters, depending on the severity of the situation. But if you are just dealing with a logical failure, you can get your files back on your own for far less.

We recently attempted a data recovery from the crashed drive of a Popular Mechanics colleague whose 120 GB MacBook drive had spontaneously given up the ghost. We removed the drive from her laptop, then used our USB drive adapter to hook it up to a desktop computer for diagnosis. We didn't hear any sounds that indicated a truly dead drive, so our first step was to download the free demo diagnostic tool at Prosoft Engineering to check what might be salvageable. Many companies offer demos that will scan your drive and give you a pretty good idea of what's recoverable before you lay down money to buy their software.

Once the assessment indicated we'd get good results, we used Prosoft's Data Rescue II software ($99), which is tailored for the Mac OS and Mac-formatted drives. There are far more options for PC owners, including Prosoft's Data Rescue PC ($99), as well as Ontrack EasyRecovery DataRecovery ($199) and RecoverMyFiles ($60) from GetData.

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Most of these products work in a similar way. Install the software, select the defective drive as your source and choose a destination folder to receive the data. (Make sure your recovery drive has enough space for the contents of your failed drive.) Then be prepared to wait, and wait. A full scan and recovery of our 120 GB drive took four days, and a larger drive could take longer.

Recovering a hard drive is a bit like getting back a stolen car

Recovering a hard drive is a bit like getting back a stolen car—you'll be happy to have your files back, but the results could be messy. No data recovery program will return your files to you in exactly the condition you originally kept them. These programs are designed to essentially do a data dump from your problem drive to a new drive. Files will be organized by type (JPEG images will be in one folder, Word documents in some other folder, MPEG movies in another) and your songs and photos will be mixed with random sound and image files from your computer's system folder.

Additionally, the names of all your files will have been changed to various alphanumeric sequences, such as IMG1039.jpg or MOV2010.mov. So be prepared to settle in for a long weekend of sifting through and renaming your files. Oh, and while you're at it, now's a good time to buy that backup drive.

Drive Disasters: Worst-Case Scenario

What if your hard drive is suffering from something a bit worse than your everyday hard-drive crash? How much damage can your data take before it's gone forever? We wanted to find out what could be salvaged from a computer that had been through a natural disaster, so we simulated a really bad one. We decided upon an earthquake/flood doomsday scenario. First, we took two laptop drives, loaded them with test movie and music files, then beat the heck out of them until we heard the signature clicking of mechanical hard-drive failure. Then we submerged one of the drives in custom- made storm-surge floodwaters (salt water, construction debris, oil) and let it soak for four days.

We sent both hard drives to Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery, which sells data-rescue services to both corporate clients and consumers. Ontrack's Jeff Pederson analyzed the drives in the company's clean room and found that the read/write heads in our dry drive were bent from our abuse and that we had scratched the platters. Our flooded drive was wet, but the platters were undamaged. Pederson replaced the heads and performed a recovery.

The results? Pederson was able to save 99 percent of the data from the dry drive and 100 percent from the flooded drive. Had we been paying customers, the service would have cost us $1200 each.

Source : http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a3086/hard-drive-recovery/

Why Is It Not Possible To Easily Recover Data On A Hard Drive That Is Overwritten?

Many people may think that data are missing and a professional can still perform Raid data recovery or hard disk recovery. In reality, the data has not been removed. A computer hard drive does not know how to locate the data. The information, which tells your computer where to locate the data, is missing. This is also the reason why the best professionals who perform laptop data recovery or hard disk data recovery cannot locate important files after a drive has been reformatted. How do professionals find information to perform hard disk data recovery if you have not reformatted a drive and had it overwritten? These hard disk drives store information magnetically and do not require anyone monitoring the information on the drive. Those strings of data in eight 1's and 0's may look like gibberish, but a hard drive can use those 1's and 0's to keep stored data separate.

Hard drives use magnetism to store Information

Similar to a car battery, hard drives have magnets that have a plus and minus pole. The poles represent the binary code 1 and 0 is a computer uses. The hard disk storage unit or platter contains a ferromagnetic surface and divides the binary codes into magnetic regions, called magnetic domains. Data is stored by the direction of the magnetism of these domains. The magnetic domains are magnetised in one of two directions and represent a 1 or 0. Data is stored in two ways on a hard disk unit. Before 2005, this data was recorded parallel to the disk surface, meaning the binary code was either recorded with left or right magnetism. This type of recording was called longitudinal recording. Around 2005 and later, this magnetism used to record binary code has been used to record segments being recorded vertically and perpendicular; it is called perpendicular recording. It adds a layer to the recording process and the magnetic domains are stored closer together.

Why your computer cannot find your file and what happens when data is overwritten

You cannot find your file and sometimes, you take your computer into a professional who is skilled in laptop data recovery or hard disk recovery and they cannot find your files either. If your data has been overwritten, the best professional in the world, even if they are good at Raid data recovery, cannot help you. Your computer may not find data because it has written over the stored data. The files are located using a table on your computer and rather than delete the information in the file, your computer marks the space where the file is as vacant. By doing this, it is able to write over the existing data and this is why the best Raid data recovery specialist or hard disk recovery professional cannot retrieve your files. The operating system writes over old data with new data, essentially deleting it.

Laptop data recovery is a long shot after data is overwritten

 Your information may be recoverable if it has been overwritten. If data has been overwritten, the magnetic domains are changed through re-magnetization. The process is not reversible and it is slim recovering data because it would require the use of a magnetic force microscope.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Jake_Orton/1925285

 -hard disk drive data recovery-

How to Recover All Your Data: A Few Efficient Approaches

How can you efficiently recover all your data when your desktop, laptop or tablet crashes or loses some of the data? Furthermore, databases, which are collections of interrelated data, are used rampantly by all organizations involved such as, hospitals, banks, travel agencies, hotels, shopping complexes and you name it! So what do you do when these databases with huge collections of important data suddenly get sabotaged? This article touches on these aspects, and gives you tips on data recoveries. So why don't you read on?

First of all, let's talk about your laptop, desktop or tablet that you use on a daily basis. The best ways to recover all the data on these machines when they crash without warning or say, lose part of the data due to some error happening is to keep a backup of all your data in flash drives which have a good many GB's of storage in varieties. Find out and then decide how many GB's of data from your machine and/or together with storage from other sources you need and then purchase that flash drive within that capacity or more and keep a backup of all your important data. You need to update your backup weekly preferably, if not daily. This will enable you to recover all your data on your computer by using the backups.

Let's say you have a huge collection of audio, photos, files in different formats and they are continually growing on your computer and you want to backup all of your data from Day 1 until today and also, you are not being able to keep all your data intact on your computer. In fact, you are dealing with terabytes (TB) of data and that means you need to backup all your data all along and also remove some of the old data from your computer to make some space for new ones. The best way to maintain data in this case is to use an external portable hard drive and backup everything in it. This kind of external hard drive can store several TB's of data and you get to choose which size is right for you.

If you do not deal with GB's and TB's of data but still need to backup your computer's data you can use rewritable CD-ROM disks which will be able to store a good many megabytes (MB's) of data. I guess you get the idea.

Now let us consider recovery approaches for databases used by organizations as I mentioned earlier.

Periodically, the entire database is copied (backed up), typically to tapes, compact disks, or external portable hard drives (which I described earlier). Backups also can be made incrementally i.e. only the changes since the last backup are stored. A log file is used to record the changes in the database at each update, typically the old and new values of the updated attribute(s).

When an error occurs:

If the database itself is damaged (media failure, e.g. by a head crash)

- The last backup is loaded

- The updates of all committed (completed) transactions that were executed since the time of last backup are shown by the log. Those transactions that had not committed yet need to be restarted.

If the database itself is not damaged, but the correctness of the contents cannot be guaranteed (e.g. because a program with updates crashed)

- The log is used for repeating committed changes (redo) and reversing non-committed changes (undo). Then, the non-committed transactions can be restarted.

Summing up, it always boils down to the fact that whether you are concerned with your computer's data or a database's data, you will need backups, plain and simple.

Rosina S Khan wrote this article in order to provide information on recovery approaches for data on your PC's and laptops and/or any organization's important data in large databases.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9234896

- hard disk drive data recovery -

Data Security Protection

Have you ever thought about how important it is to protect your online and computer data? Many of us use our computers and other electronics on a daily basis and constantly utilize important files and documents to get what we need done. If you want to make sure that your personal information isn’t shared with the world, you will want to consider data security protection. There are various ways in which you can protect yourself and your private information. Take a look at the following information to learn more.

One step that you should always take to protect your data is regularly back up your data. This is very important in the event that your computer is stolen or your personal information is compromised. You want to be able to have access to your important files right away. Make sure that you back up data regularly. You may want to consider marking this event on a calendar, so that you don’t forget.

You should also consider password protecting important documents. Did you know that you have the ability to password protect many file types? You can do this with PDF documents, for example. This is a great idea if you have social security numbers, bank account numbers, and birthdays visible in your personal documents.

Make sure that you’re not allowing others to have access to your important files. If you use a wireless network and allow other computers to regularly connect, you may be allowing the other computers to have access to your files. Take the time to review your file sharing configurations so that you avoid accidently sharing information. Additionally, review your virus software to ensure that you have firewalls and other protection methods in place to disable outside intruders.

Another tip you may want to consider is data encryption. You can make sure that all of your data is unreadable to the everyday person. With data encryption, you will need a special passcode or key in order to read files and see the information that is present. This is a great way to make sure that no one but you have access to these files.

As you can see, there are many steps that you can take to protect your private files. Without doing so, you can leave yourself vulnerable to a data attack.

If you’re interested in learning more about data security protection, be sure to check back with our weblog.

My Asus UL30A is a Great Laptop!

Computers have certainly come a long way in the last few decades and with each passing year they just keep getting better and better. From huge boxes to bulky laptops to even smaller bulky computers and laptop we have seen a huge change. In today’s world it is not uncommon for people to surf the web and send emails from their cell phone. The new Asus UL30A is a great computer from start to finish. It has awesome features and a nice frame that makes for one of the best computers on the market today. Just check out what the new Asus UL30A has to offer

It is powered by a low voltage processor which consists of an Intel Core 2 Duo and comes standard with a battery that will last you up to 12 hours of continuous work during the day without the need to charge it. That is the biggest problem that a lot of people have when it comes to their laptop that the battery does not stay charged past 2 hours and it can be quite annoying when you are trying to work away from home or the office. Not every place has a place to plus in your charger and sometimes charging your computer just seems like a huge hassle you do not want to deal with. When you get to the point where you are writing or researching and you have to stop to plug your charger in, it can be quite a pain to get back into the groove your were in before.
Some of the other features you will find when it comes to the Asus UL30A is a multi-gesture touchpad and multimedia entertainment to satisfy the needs of movie watchers and gamers. The screen is 13.3 inches across and has a bright screen that will make you want to watch all your movies on your small notebook. It has a total of 4 GB of Ram but you can expand that to a total of 8 GB of Ram which means more memory and less hardship on your battery. Try out 500 GB of hard drive space out and keep all your movies, music and pictures without worrying about running out of space.

The Asus UL30A comes with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition (64 Bit) and is 5-in-1 memory reader compatible. You will find a small webcam at the top of the laptop to help stay connected with friends and send pictures. There is an Asus Ice Cool Technology that will allow for a cool touch when placing your palms on the palm rest.

The Asus UL30A is a great computer and the ultimate multimedia laptop for movie lovers. You have all the features you need and plenty of time on your battery to last half a day. Try out the new Asus UL30A and find out why is one of the most popular computers out there on the market today.

XD Card Format Recovery - Recover XD Card Pictures after Format

Recover Pictures after Formatting XD Card

I have an XD card that stored thousands of pictures, but I mistakenly formatted the card just now. Thos pictures are quite important to me, but I know it will take lots of money if I ask professional data recovery service for help. So I want to perform the data recovery by myself. However, I have never done such a thing before. Therefore, I hope somebody can give me a clue. I will appreciate it very much if I can restore those deleted pictures with your help.

XD card, a type of memory card, is often used to store digital pictures. Since pictures are often unique and important, data loss from XD card becomes a terrible problem. Usually, the most common cause for XD card data loss is deletion. It frequently happens that XD card users mistakenly delete pictures on their digital camera or computer when viewing those pictures. 

Another common cause for XD card data loss should be formatting. Users can directly format an XD card on their digital camera. Or users can also format the XD card on their computer. In most cases, users often format an XD card and lose important photos by mistake. However, in some cases, users would format an XD card on purpose because the card is showing not formatted error or other errors.

Download the Following Software to Recover Data

	#1 Data Recovery Software to restore data off usb drive, memory card, pen drive, hard disk, external drive etc. How to use: best disk recovery software for step by step guide	#1  must try recovery software
	#2 Data Recovery Software Another chance for you to recover data from disk, card, external etc.    How to use: Windows data recovery steps	#2  must try recovery software
	#3 Data Recovery for Card USB - recover data from card/usb How to use: memory card recovery tutorials	#3 must try recovery software

XD Card Format Recovery

After formatting XD card, you realize that you make a mistake and delete important photos due to formatting. At this time, you should stop reformatting the XD card. If you format the XD card on your digital camera, you should take it out off the camera and connect it to a computer by using a card reader. You should remember that you cannot write data to the XD card any more unless all lost files have been restored.

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Now, you can use XD card recovery software to perform lost file recovery. You can free download the software and install it to a computer. When you run the software, you can see your XD card is recognized as an external drive on the software. You only need to select the XD card and allow the software to scan the card for lost files.

Usually, with help of XD card recovery software, you can restore lost photos as well as types of files in a short time. In the scanning process, you don’t need to wait until the end of the scanning and the software will show you all found files. The software is reliable and secure, so you can use it without any worry.

XD Card Format Recovery Tips

1. Don’t reformat XD card after formatting

2. Don’t write more data to the formatted XD card

3. Take out the XD card from digital camera and avoid cause physical damage to the card

4. Don’t save the recovered files to the original XD card

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How to Recover Data from Formatted Partition

Is It Possible to Restore Formatted Partition?

Situation 1: Is it possible to restore formatted partition?

Case: I formatted a partition on my computer when I found it has bad sectors. But now, I want to restore some important files from the formatted partition. I am wondering if it is possible to restore a formatted partition and retrieve lost files.

Situation 2: Can I recover data from reformatted partition when it has not formatted error?

Case: One of partition on my computer was unable to be open by showing not formatted error, so I formatted the partition because my friend told me formatting can fixing the not formatted error. He also told me files deleted due to reformatting can be recovered after I repair the not formatted error. Then he recommended a data recovery tool to me, but the tool didn’t help me restore any file. Do I still have chance to restore the lost files due to reformatting?

Situation 3: Is it possible to unformat a partition after writing data to it?

Case: I wrongly formatted a partition on my computer and lost everything on the partition. Then I decided to use an unformat tool to restore those lost files. However, when I was downloading the unformat tool, I mistakenly saved the tool to the formatted partition. I got information from Internet that it is impossible to restore any data if the partition has been overwritten by new added data. Is that true? Is it still possible to restore files from the formatted partition?

How to Recover Data from Formatted Partition?

Formatted partition is recoverable by using third-party data recovery software. Format recovery software is a professional data recovery program that is available for all brands of computers.

By relying on format recovery software, it is possible to restore any data like pictures, images, mp3 files, mp4 files, audio files, emails, and office files, etc. The software is free of charge and it allows users to restore lost files in batch. To make data recovery much more convenient and effective, the format recovery software lists different files in various folders so that users can easily find out the files they want to recover.

Download the Following Software to Recover Data

	#1 Data Recovery Software to restore data off usb drive, memory card, pen drive, hard disk, external drive etc. How to use: best disk recovery software for step by step guide	#1  must try recovery software
	#2 Data Recovery Software Another chance for you to recover data from disk, card, external etc.    How to use: Windows data recovery steps	#2  must try recovery software
	#3 Data Recovery for Card USB - recover data from card/usb How to use: memory card recovery tutorials	#3 must try recovery software

What If Formatted Partition Has Been Overwritten?

Indeed, to guarantee that you can restore all lost files due to formatting, it is often required that the formatted partition cannot be overwritten by new files. When you write a file to the formatted partition, it will occupy the space on the partition. However, the space the new data occupies might be used to store the lost files before formatting. If so, the lost files will be overwritten and become unrecoverable. However, when you write data to the formatted partition, it doesn’t mean the whole partition has been overwritten. Therefore, you don’t lose the chance for data recovery completely.

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