Answers to many of your
computer related questions.
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Do it
yourself data recovery.
How to recover your data
if your drive turns to dust.
Hard drives are mechanical devices that
contain moving parts. There are certain things you can do to
prevent an extreme data disaster, but every drive manufactured
(yes, even your drive), is going to stop working one day. When
it does, it will take all the data you've ever created right
along with it. This type of failure can be catastrophic, such
as a severe "head crash," in which the drive's read/write
heads scrape the platters and literally turn your data into
dust.
Take precautions
But your drive doesn't have to experience
a complete failure before you lose access to your files. A simple
freeze of your favorite application can lock up your computer
and lead you to a reboot. Then suddenly your computer loses
contact with your hard drive. In this scenario your drive's
directory simply did not get updated properly when the crash
occurred.
You might be able to recover your data and get on with your
computing life. Of course the best solution for getting up and
running quickly is to restore from the daily backups you've
been running for years, right? (In case the backups are not
as up-to-date as you thought they were, read on.)
Recover data
If your hard drive hasn't suffered a catastrophic
failure (such as the aforementioned head crash) or some other
mechanical malfunction, you can use disk utility software to
try to fix the damage.
Common sense caution: If your hard drive is making any unusual
noise, clicking, scraping, buzzing, grinding, or what have you,
do not attempt to recover the drive on your own. Instead, contact
a professional data recovery service company.
Two disk utility options
To recover data yourself you need to use
a disk utility.
The Microsoft ScanDisk program, which
is built into the Windows operating system is one option.
For more powerful recovery options you can invest in a commercial
software product like Norton Utilities from Symantec.
These programs run fix-it routines that scan the hard drive
and review the various directory structures used to maintain
a record of where data are stored. The disk utility makes its
best guess about the way your drive is organized, fixes whatever
damage it finds, and brings your drive back to the way it was
before your machine crashed.
While these programs are very capable of fixing a damaged disk,
they should be used with extreme caution. Remember how we said
they made assumptions about the directory structure? Well, occasionally
these assumptions can be incorrect, causing you to lose data.
As a rule, you should never attempt to fix a damaged directory
with a disk utility unless if offers a way of backing out. Both
of the programs mentioned allow you to save an UnDo file to
a floppy disk in case your fix-it routine doesn't work as it
should.
