Hard Drive failure precautions
One of the last problems a regular computer owner wants to deal with is loosing all of their personal data. Not having the proper resources or advanced knowledge in order to solve the problem can often worsen the situation. Precautions when coming across a hard drive failure include being aware of the reason of failure, how to prevent worsening the situation and where to go to safely and efficiently to get it repaired.
The first step is to be knowledgeable about the reasons why the hard drive might have failed. This is so that; as a user, one can become more aware to the way the computer is being handled in the future to prevent the problem from reoccurring. Other than natural failure the fail can arise either physically, internally or through software. A hard drive’s physical failure can occur through wear and tearing, liquid spills, fire and mishandling. When not taken care of physically, the destruction and failure of the drive is more likely to situate and in some cases may be un-repairable. When speaking of Solid State drives, the nature of failure is different. An SSD or a USB flash drive is made entirely of electronics and can therefore fail due to a component issue on the board. Another common physical failure also happens to be the damaging of a USB flash drive. This can lead to the disconnection of the USB port. An internal failure can arise when traditional hard drives that hold motors and platters are used and ran for extensive periods of time, causing it to wear out or over work itself. Also, having a dusty environment around your device can cause the drive to ingest the dust particles and damage internal parts. The last area a drive can fail through is by its software. When corruption in the software or a power surge occurs, it can lead to further problems such as the controller going bad. Most importantly, effects that can cause all variations of trouble are viruses. A virus can go as far as to affect the drive’s inside surface. When being more aware of all these reasons to hard drive destruction, the proper precautions can be executed towards recovering your data.
The second step is to be informed of what not to do to the failed drive without professional assistance. The owner should not run third party programs, open the drive on one’s own or use multiple recovery soft wares. Running third party programs are an unreliable source to recovery and can worsen the situation whether it is from unknown hacking or viruses that can irrupt. One must also not run check disk repair, Mac disk utility or copy data especially if the drive is terribly slow. When it comes to opening the drives, if not done by a professional, it can be very hazardous and risky. This is because a drive cannot be opened without a clean surrounding environment. Some common examples of devices an owner would try to fix would be iPhones, iPads, and Solid State hard drive main boards. Doing electronic work on a printed circuit board (PCB) can cause damage to the board and will lead to further internal issues. Working on USB boards can also cause serious damage to data and chips. Lastly, trying multiple different soft wares can cause overwriting which makes data recovery impossible. In final words, its highly advised to avoid the following repair attempts, especially if the data is of grave importance.
Finally, the most important step is to take your hard drive to a trust able source for repair. By online searching, calling different sources and visiting labs, the process of repair becomes less stressful and the owner gains more secure dependability on the professional during the repair process. When conducting an online search, the best thing to do is search for data recovery in your residential area/city. After finding trustworthy resources, it is of advisory to call at least three of the different data recovery labs found. This is because a professional data recovery company has high-end tools and operators to repair properly and efficiently. The higher end the tools are, the higher chance of success in recovery. When visiting or calling different labs, doing prior research and asking questions helps to clarify and understand more of the specific issues and causes of the hard drive failure. Making knowledgeable choices and choosing dependable data recovery companies can save you money and recover all of you personal data.
In conclusion, when one’s hard drive fails; knowing the causes, prevention and proper solutions/resources can take the owner a long way and can educate them for future incidents. This in result can bring upon more awareness to safe device handling and cautious procedures when coming across hard drive destruction.