Hard Drive Crash Data Recovery

What are your data recovery options after a hard drive crash?

It can happen at any time. It seems to happen at the most inconvenient times. You may not have experienced that sinking feeling that comes when you realize your computer's hard disk has crashed and that you may now be missing important data, but that doesn't mean it wont happen - tomorrow, next week or next month. So what should you do if this happens to you - what if your hard drive stops working?

Before looking at what to do after the fact, it's important to understand a little more about the risks inherent in storing your data on a magnetic disk. Don't get me wrong - modern drives are very reliable with steadily rising MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) figures. But failures still occur. And they are even more likely in a portable device like a laptop computer because of the increased risk of impact damaging the drive. They tend to get jarred, jolted and occasionally dropped.

You should take a proactive approach to detecting harddisk failure. Often there will be symptoms apparent for some time before the failure occurs. Things to be aware of include unusual noises coming from the drive and unexplained data access related errors. Any unusual noise should be taken seriously. This includes wining noises or grinding and scraping noises.

If you detect anything untoward with your existing drive, your first step should be to back up any important data immediately. You could back it up to a second harddrive, a DVD or some other portable media for possible recovery later. The next step is to purchase a new drive. There will of course be a delay between when your computer starts acting suspiciously and when you manage to procure your new disk drive and this is where the backup is critical. Imagine uttering the words "my hard drive crashed" the night before your planned shopping trip to buy a new one when it had been making strange noises for the past 3 or 4 days. A simple backup could have mitigated that risk. Once you have your new drive, it's a simple matter to install it and recover your backup then you're back in business.

How Do You Know If Your Hard Drive Has Crashed?

If your drive does not spin up, meaning you can't hear any noise coming from it despite there definitely being power available to it, this is a fair indication that that there has been a physical hardware failure. Also, if the drive does spin up but your computer's BIOS doesn't recognize the drive, this can also be a good indication.

What Are Your Options?

Well there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that recovery rates of data in this situation are quite good. The bad news is that data recovery from a drive which has suffered a physical failure really requires a specialist data recovery service - and this can be expensive. It will certainly run into the hundreds of dollars and will in all likelihood top $1,000. But it is a specialist area requiring specialized skills and equipment and can be quite labor-intensive. So the decision to be made is this - how much is your data worth? If you run a business, it may be fairly easy to assign a dollar value to lost information. However, if the information is personal (like photos and other personal documents) the decision can be more difficult. It's hard to put a price on this sort of information.

Another option to consider is data recovery software. Be aware, however, that most of these software applications are aimed at restoring data which has been deleted or corrupted. Even if your computer boots up, if you suspect a serious hardware problem with the drive it may be safer not to use this software unless you really know what you're doing. Any attempt to manipulate data on a severely malfunctioning drive could lead to further damage.

In closing, I just want to reiterate the importance of having current backups of your important data. There are other things that can happen - things like deletion due to human error or corruption due to a virus or some other malicious attack. A hard drive crash is not the only situation which requires data recovery.