How to recover information from a damaged hard drive

Hard Drive Recovery
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Despite taking preventive measures or backup, that a hard disk fails and can lose valuable information comes within the possibilities of everyday given that the hard disk can suffer accidents, errors of various kinds, which has a determined life or something as basic as delete a particular file by accident.

When a hard drive is not recognized by your operating system, makes strange noises or directly seems “dead“, how to retrieve the information it contains, especially if it is personal and / or work and have no backup, it is a necessity. Although depending on the type of error or have to resort to a specialized company, there is some checks software and we can be helpful to know the situation we face and to act accordingly to recover lost information on a disk hard.

Types of hard disk failure: How to recognize them

Talk about a hard drive is damaged we can serve as input to alert us but we must refine diagnosis more to find out how we can act to try to retrieve the information. We say information because it is common that if a hard disk is damaged, the chances are that we can retrieve the information but do not continue to use this unit safely.

Faced with a damaged hard drive first thing to know is whether it is physical or software failure. We begin by analyzing the physical and for that, if it is an internal hard drive, the best is to remove it from its usual place but keep it connected, so that we can handle comfortably. Do not forget to unburden of static electricity before any operation with it.

After removing the hard drive must check if when you turn the hard disk spins or makes noise that cannot associate usual when we’ve been working with it normally. If to operate it makes no noise and it seems that the drives to spin (in the case of mechanical), make sure it is not food problem. It is best to check that the cables are connected and no damage on them. If nevertheless continue to do nothing, we can try to change cables to rule that there is failure.

Read also: How to prevent hard drive failure and data loss

Another simple and straightforward to dismiss the problem is computer power and no hard drive check is directly connect to another computer (if it works, the problem may be in the power of our team) or through an external housing.

In addition to matters related to food, including electronic failures of a hard disk must consider the related disk logic board (PCB). A few years ago, looking exactly like a model and change the PCB could be used in very specific cases, but the task seems simple entrance is almost impossible to achieve with current discs, which have some components as parametrized for that disk heads concrete.

Physical failure of hard drives typically requires the intervention of specialized companies, with a high cost for the home user. In any case, the disk can no longer be used more safely

In these cases it is advisable to try to find solutions to issues of PCBs in technical services that include environment, tools and parts that could be used to retrieve information that has been inaccessible to the hard disk.

If you connect the hard disk is turned on but emits strange noises (the typical is a repetitive clack-clack) must begin to think that the problem is mechanical and reading errors due to head for displacement thereof or the dishes They damaged. Here a brief stop: if ever heard the “trick” to freeze the hard drive, unless your unit is very old and very low capacity, better not try. It will not work with new materials of the plates, which are not affected and that level by the heat, and there are more risks of losing data completely to solve the problem.

These failures may be due to head blows, continuous vibration or degradation of the emulsion .In addition to the repetitive noise (can also start with noise, then go off at once), it is usual that the unit is not recognized by the BIOS and sole system boot failure.

If we get a hard drive with physical failure time work, all you must do is make a cloned to try to retrieve the information in the copy and not the damaged disc

In most cases of physical or electronic failures, it will require the intervention of a specialized company to make changes or head cleaning, dishes transplant, repair firmware modules…

An important rule to comply with any hard drive failure is that, if we can recover or run long enough, the first thing should be to make a clone of itself to work on that copy and make sure we do not lose a base that is and we could definitely lose by acting directly on the damaged hard disk.

Repair a hard drive fails or gives errors

When trying to retrieve information from a damaged hard drive, the best situation is that the damage is not physical (or only the latter has caused bad sectors) but logical. The reasons are numerous: unpremeditated formatting, corruption of files, deletion of certain documents or even a virus. In many cases, the user with the aid of specific software can recover all or part of the information.

Read also: Backups on our devices… Why should we perform?

If your disk has bad sectors we must act as soon as possible so that we can retrieve the information is maximized

Starting from the situation in which the operating system boots but either a partition, external hard drive or internal areas, are not accessible, there are different ways we can take to try to save the information.

If the error is bad sectors, which may come degradation caused by hard disc or head for specific failures, the hard drive will be accessible part and we will make immediate action to prevent aggravating the problem go away. Typically we notice symptoms by a sudden slowdown in the operation of the hard disk or noises when trying to access these bad sectors affected area.

Although you can recover all data if the damage is not physical, even the bad sectors, there is no 100% guarantee that happen always.

The first thing to do if the operating system boots and think that there are errors in sectors, will diagnose the hard disk, which can perform the specific function included in Windows to check for disk errors or free tools like Crystal Disk Info, much more complete. If you use Windows tool from itself and solutions we can apply that proposes it.

A hard disk with bad sectors, including repaired, no longer reliable to store information that does not want to lose

If this action is not solved the problem, we can use specialized software to repair bad sectors as HDD Regenerator, working in sectors with failures magnetization. Once the recovery process finished it’s time to make a cloned hard disk to start the retrieval of information from that unit.

If these methods do not work, they have to resort to more aggressive methods such as low-level formatting tools provided to us as HDD LLF or Lowvel. In these cases, the information will no longer be recoverable but can get a drive where isolating bad sectors on a partition, to give a non-essential use as it will be a matter of time that the disk can fail again.

How to recover deleted files

The easiest to work with a hard disk where we want to retrieve information is determined we can use software to rescue images, data or documents that have lost file corruption, formatting or deleting files by accident. The same applies to memory cards or USB drives generally.

To recover a deleted hard disk of the time from which we removed file is key to success in recovery. You is able to save it to when

When a file is deleted from a hard drive, what actually happens is that the operating system receives the information that the space previously occupied by an image or document is again free for use. Therefore the information is kept physically and there is a good chance that we can get it back easily.

Read also: How to Remove a Fake Antivirus That Is Spamming Your Notifications With Virus Threats?

The most important thing when trying to retrieve deleted information from a hard drive is to do so as soon as possible, because we and the operating system itself would occupy that space with new information at any time and make more complex and costly to try to recover. If the document to recover is critical, it is best to disconnect the hard drive and use it as a slave on another computer to prevent the operating system will use more than necessary. And if we can, we must run the recovery software from a different unit from which we try to analyze in search of the deleted file.

One of the most simple and intuitive software to recover deleted files is Recuva, Filerecovery or Pandora Recovery. In all cases one takes search for deleted files, of which we can know the status and whether they are recoverable or not.

If we go further we can use TestDisk, which also help to recover files, you can scan drives, repair partitions, backup errors or work with our PC boot. If we are looking for something more specific to memory card photos, Undelete Plus we can perfectly serve.

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