Inside the Hard Drive Data Recovery Process

There's a lot that goes on behind the walls of clean rooms and laboratories in a data recovery facility. Although data recovery software can salvage data off hard drives that mechanically work, specialised tools are needed to fix disks that have physical faults or damage.

The two most common mechanical hard disk crashes are caused by problems in the drive's electronics or the read head. A drive's read head is the device that reads and writes data onto the disk's magnetic surface. Problems often come up when the drive vibrates in such a way that causes the head to touch the magnetic surface of the disk, potentially damaging data in that section. Fortunately defective heads often only affect a small portion of data. Electronic failures are a much less severe and often just require new electronic controllers or components.

So what's the actual hard drive data retrieval process? Firstly a drive must be sent to a crashed hard drive data recovery provider such as Ontrack Data Recovery for assessment. This establishes the damage done to the disk, what data is recoverable and the expected cost.

Engineers run through a range of tests each getting more complex to establish what is wrong with the drive. Firstly, the drive is connected to power to test it's electronics. If the drive doesn't power up the electronics are replaced, then the drive is dismantled to reveal the head that reads data from the disk's magnetic surface.

Often these drive heads can become defective if they've been hit or dropped suddenly. Data recovery on a hard disk takes this into account, and can be discovered in one of these drive examinations.

It's crucial that the drive is opened in a clean room as any dust particles that fall on the drive can be damaging. Hard drive data retrieval labs have powerful extraction systems and  ionizers to ensure this doesn't happen.

Once the disk has been manually repaired it's attached to specialised software that analyses the packets of data on the system. The software comes back with how possible data recovery will be on the hard disk, and clones the data onto a new working drive.

Once the drive is cloned onto the functional counterpart lab software is used to reconstruct drive partitions and structure. Fortunately when hard drives delete files they're never really deleted so often a large portion of data found in a crashed hard drive data recovery process can be salvaged.

If your data is important and valuable, you should not only keep good backups but ensure your disk is not fragmented. Large fragmented files often cause problems for data recovery as they're spread far and wide across the disk. Regular defragmentation will not only speed up your computer, it'll make files more retrievable should disaster hit.

Crashed hard drive data recovery is a specialised process that needs a specialised company. Ontrack Data Recovery provide high-level data recovery services that will retrieve the maximum possible amount of data off your disk. You can find out more about our services here.