Can you recover data from a damaged hard drive?
When a hard drive has suffered physical damage – whether due
to a fall, electrical surge, mechanical failure or anything else – it does not necessarily
mean that the data that you have stored on it is lost forever. Yes, it’s
possible that the damage is so severe that your data is beyond retrieval but
this is a lot less likely than you may think.
If your hard drive has suffered physical damage, what you do
after you’ve realised that something’s amiss is absolutely vital. So, if your
computer fails to boot, your hard drive starts to make suspicious noises or you
have good reason to believe your drive’s damaged (if you recently dropped the
device housing it, for example) power it down immediately. Trying to boot up
the drive under such circumstances is likely to do further damage so our advice
is always to remain calm and turn it off as soon as possible.
Following this, it can be tempting to try and attempt a DIY
recovery. Be warned, though, the internet is full of recommendations that are
actually going to do far more harm than good like the ‘freezer
method’.
Data recovery software is another common tool a home user
may employ in order to try and recover their precious files but, if your drive
has suffered from physical damage, it’s not going to work. Put simply, data
recovery software is designed to recover data lost due to logical errors and
will be of no benefit in this instance as a result. In fact, as utilising such
software incorrectly can actually make the problem worse, it’s not something we’d
advise anyone other than the most technically proficient of users attempt even
if could potentially help.
Sadly, DIY options very rarely yield the results users desire
and the task of recovering data from a physically damaged hard drive is one
that will almost certainly require the drive be removed from its casing. As a
result, its owner will most likely need to instruct a professional data
recovery company. What’s more, they’ll need to ensure that said company has a clean
room as the microscopic particles present in the air are more than capable of
causing irreparable damage to a drive’s magnetic platters and prevent any kind
of recovery whatsoever.
Naturally, we’d recommend you choose Fields Data Recovery –
and you
can book a free, no-obligation data recovery diagnostic here – but, whoever
you do choose, please don’t try a DIY data recovery!