You are at your computer and all of a sudden, your computer flashes black and then the blue screen of death (BSOD) appears, telling you that you have a fatal error. You try to restart your computer, but unfortunately, the only message you receive is that your computer is unable to boot. Or maybe you are working at your computer and all of a sudden hear a clicking and grinding noise from your hard drive. Your computer shuts down and every time you try to reboot it, all you hear is the clicking noise and all you see is that your computer is unable to boot up. All of your life’s work is on that hard drive. all of your expensive software, all of your family and vacation pictures from the last 10 years. Even worse, you have not been backing up your hard drive like you should. And, oh no! You realize that your extensive music library, all the music you digitized from your old vinyl collection, is now seemingly lost.
But, is it?
Chances are we will be able to recover most, if not all of your data, especially if your hard drive failure is not due to a physical crash.
We highly recommend every computer user has a backup plan and further recommend Carbonite online backup. It’s extremely simple to use and will backup all of your important files online so you restore them if your hard drive is to crash. Trust us, it happens, fairly often in fact.
A hard drive that has physically crashed has probably suffered a head crash or a motor that no longer works. Often this type of damage to a hard disk will cause damage to the data and damage to the logical filing system. Professionals need to take your hard drive apart and replace the platter into a working drive in order to begin the process of data recovery. Physical crashes will likely not result in full recovery of data.
A hard drive that crashes due to the corruption of files manifests in several different ways. Most commonly the crash will corrupt the operating system and in that case, we can either repair or reinstall your operating system. The file system on a hard disk or the disk partition may be corrupted as well. The reasons behind these types of corruptions are varied and the disk will need to be analyzed to see how to repair the damage. Almost always this type of damage is caused by some sort of virus or other malware that rewrites the master boot record or the partition table. After analyzing the cause of this sort of damage, we are able to repair the file system, if necessary, or reconstruct the partition table and master boot record. After we do this for the computer user, we are better able to recover data, files, and information the user may value highly.