Minimizing data loss and avoiding the need for Data Recovery Services

If your hard drive makes any unusual noises including scraping, grinding or clicking, turn it off. You may be damaging
the platters in your hard drive which contain your needed data.

Will putting my hard drive in the freezer help me recover my data?

If your hard drive will not spin, do not place the hard drive in the freezer. Although there are anecdotal reports on the
internet regarding data recovery success after freezing a hard drive, keep in mind that anything you place in a freezer
gets a thin coating of frost. Anytime you attempt to temperature control a failed hard drive, you must also control the
relative humidity in the hard drive enclosure.

Hard drives are open to the atmosphere through a breather hole containing a microfilter. Moisture and air pass through
this barrier, so air pressure, temperature, and humidity are the same inside the hard drive mechanism as outside (when
the drive is powered off.) If you freeze a hard drive, once you remove the hard drive from the freezer, this thin coat of
frost will melt very quickly, but the condensation on the internal hard drive components will not evaporate before
potentially causing catastrophic damage to the internal components of your hard drive. So now you have a previously
failed (but presumably recoverable) hard drive, now covered in moisture. The next thing that happens is a layer of rust
and condensate form on the internal hard drive components. It does not take a data recovery engineer to understand
this may complicate recovery efforts.

Will Data Recovery Software recover my data?

Data Recovery Software may recover your data, depending on your data loss situation. If your hard drive has a physical
failure, data recovery software will not recover your data, and it may cause the need for more complex data recovery
services. When a hard drive has a physical failure, the hard disk head assembly is no longer able to read data from the
platters. This may be due to mechanical failure of the hard drive such as a failed voice coil (or stepper motor on older
hard drives) which moves the heads across the hard drive platters, a failed or detached read/write head, or a component
failure on the printed circuit board of the hard drive.

If your hard drive has a physical failure of an internal component, such as a detached head, the head may impact the
platters, causing a head strike, resulting in more damage to the hard drive, making successful data recovery more
complex.

If your hard drive has a purely logical failure, you have a possibility of successful data recovery with data recovery
software. Data recovery software may be successful in recovering your data from such failures as MBR or Master Boot
Record corruption, partiton table corruption, or other simple logical failures. Data recovery software will not perform
successful recovery if the logical hard drive failure results from a corrupt G-List or P-List, corrupt hard drive firmware,
or corruption of the SA or system area of a the failed hard drive. Data recovery software will only work if your computer
recognnizes the hard drive is attached.

Do not use data recovery utilities that save data recovery information to the hard drive you are trying to recover data from
or do not allow you to save an undo file. If you save ‘recovered’ data back to the hard drive you are recovering data from,
you may overwrite the data you actually need recovered.

Backup your mission critical data

Keep a backup of your important data. There is no substitute for a good backup. Remember, a quality backup of your data
is only as reliable as the last time you performed a test data restoration. Yes, it costs money to set-up and maintain a
reliable backup solution, but is the best way to avoid data recovery. A good backup methodology can reduce your potential
for data loss to almost zero.

For back-up consultation or set-up, please contact us at (323) 822-5111 or email service@harddrive911datarecovery.com.