Discussion: Hard Drive Recovery, please give your feedback, suggestions and comments about this article here.

Hi,

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Regards,

Antonis

Many of the symptoms describe here are OS symptoms not hardware. The only one hardware symptom is "Strange rattling noises come from inside the unit". The others are not very important in the sense that files can be copied.

When OS symptoms are found, do not launch CHKDSK or others similar tools, all the files could be in a strange state. This tool is the worst I know.

If you drive is not detected and if it is a SATA drive, the data cable perhaps is fallen down into your box...

When hearing strnage noises from the hard disk, the best thing is to give the pc to a specialist, hoping he will can make a backup. Generally it is too late.

When I meet the problem in my shop, I know that I have 50% of luck to successfully backup the drive. So I beguin with the user folder to get their datas, for the rest, they are programs, they can be reinstalled.

How to prevent such a failure? Making backups onto an other internal disk, or an external one. Hards disks are not expensive now.

When I have to check if a hard disk realy is dead, I use a program (running BSD on a CD) and make random reads/writes operations. I try to format the drive. But all the datas are lost.

Sometimes strange noises can be caused by bad sectors on one or many tracks. Datas present to these places are lost. Some programs can mark these sectors as unavailable, like this bad sectors will never be used, but this does not make the datas to come again.

This very often indicate that the free disk space is less than before and that disk is not very sure. You would have to format it.

your hard drive may die forever next minute, thus backup everything, important data backup twice, trice etc., as cd/dvd disk may appear occasionaly unreadable some time later. keep current work on flash-disk also (but never only there, as flash drives may die even more inexpectively).

I am ok with you but what is the solution ? I thougth to an internet backup, I think it is sure and not very expensive. The only limit is the data size, but...

We are not adding mirror disk on all the pcs? But the mirror can fail too... If I have well understood your answer.

Bye

my solution is backup. several times i met problems with erasing partitions, filesystems and just files (only once i had occasionally physically dead 40MB HDD long time ago ). when you wish to restore data - you may use different ready utilities (which are usually not free), but i met situations with successful restoration of data, with refusing (bad prognosis) and succesful restoration of many files of huge common size, but when i had inspected them occasionally later i met their contents absolutely different, even random! how can i trust to files restored in such way? i'm not an archeologist, who can spend years to study a text of hundred strange letters to guess what does it mean
i keep (at least i try to keep ) everything i think important on cd/dvd in 1-2-... copies. and anyway it is not enough, as i do not use backup programs to autobackup everyday (what is also a good solution). generally, if hdd dead, but not finally yet - it would better to have only some files as target to search, and better if their contents is generally known. otherwise chances can be slightly less hopefull sure, it's just my personal view