Introduction: IT/IS professionals are often faced with the necessity to recover data from physically damaged hard drives or storage devices, however; they often lack the training required to complete this task.  This paper will cover details and symptoms concerning common hard drive mechanical failures. Additionally, this paper will discuss certain methods known to be effective in countering these hard drive failures.  This paper assumes that you have applied the skills of your craft and checked the data and power cables or tried common methods of dealing with damaged partitions, boot records ..etc.


A few words of caution:  A data loss incident can be a very emotional time for anyone who values the data or has the responsibility of safeguarding it well being. A company’s entire digital portfolio or person’s lifetime of hard work may be in the balance between a successful data recovery attempt and a failed attempt. The proper implementation of data recovery techniques is a methodical and delicate practice. Attempting to apply data recovery techniques while in an emotional state or without the proper training is a recipe for disaster.

The methods discussed here have proven successful for thousands of data recovery incidents.  Many recovery methods rely heavily on proper diagnosis of the problem(s) affecting the hard drive. If the wrong diagnosis is made and the wrong method of data recovery is applied, total and permanent data loss could befall you or your client.


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