What to do when you experience Hard Drive failure??

Hard drive failure is a very common cause of data loss that could result into negative penalties for any organization. The hard drive failure is completely unpredictable. But no matter how it is caused, a loss of data, or access to data for any kind of extended period, inevitably means a loss of revenue, a loss of productivity, a loss of reputation, and increased costs.

However, if you have proper planning, it becomes easy to carry out Hard Drive Recovery and prevent permanent data loss. At Stellar Phoenix we offer following recommended strategies for dealing with hard drive failure.

1. If the failed drive is the system boot disk, immediately unplug the computer and remove the drive. Do not attempt to reboot from this drive.
2. Do not execute any system software, such as chkdsk to repair the file system unless you can afford to lose the data completely. System software is intended to repair a disk’s file system, not to recover data. These tools will most likely overwrite lost data. This utility is called differently in different operating systems like disk repair utility such as ChkDsk in Windows, fsck in Mac, Linux and UNIX and Vrepair in Novell.
3. If the failure is related to the file system (e.g., deleted files, OS failure, or virus attack…), and not a physical, electronic, or firmware failure than a reliable data retrieval software may be able to recover the disk’s data. First install the drive into an external USB enclosure for this process to reduce the disk utilization during boot up. Once the drive is recognized by the Operating System, immediately begin the data retrieval. Do not let this data retrieval run without supervision. Irrespective to the size of crashed hard drive this retrieval should not take longer than 5-6 hours max.
4. Never open a drive case. It should only be opened in a clean-room environment. Any other exposure will eventually result in the physical destruction of the disk’s magnetic layer and the complete loss of data.
5. Never attempt to swap PCBs from a healthy drive to a failed drive. Modern hard drives are manufactured with unique configuration parameters based on the tolerances of the individual components at the disk’s manufacture. Applying PCB/ROM to a disk for which it was not manufactured may destroy the drive and make it non-repairable. This is true even if the two drives share a common manufacturer, model, and manufacturing date.
6. Do not attempt to “repair” bad sectors or to read data from bad sectors by using data retrieval software on a failing disk. Doing so will either overwrite the underlying data or result in data loss.
7. In cases of water, fire, or vandalism damage, do not attempt to power up a system that contains critical data. Doing so may destroy the disk’s magnetic layer and cause the data to be non-recoverable.

Note: Do not attempt to run a data recovery software your hard drive, or take any other action if your hard disk drive is making grinding, clicking or mechanical beeping and whirring noises during boot-up. These sounds indicate hard drive failure and attempting to fix the problem yourself could cause permanent damage to your hard drive platters and a permanent loss of data. However, if the data on the drive is mission critical, we recommend immediately contacting a professional data recovery service like Stellar Phoenix Solutions.

At Stellar Phoenix, we have been studying various variety of hard drives like Parallel ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA (SATA), Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), Solis State Drive (SSD), Hybrid Hard Drive (or, H-HDD), Flash Drive, Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), iSCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Enhanced Small Disk Interface (ESDI), Shugart Associates System Interface (SASI) etc. We have experience in recovering data from any kind of viruses, accidents and malware then most of our competition.

Put us to the test today! We guarantee our service standards.

• Call us at 1 855 BY STELLAR (297 8355) or click here to complete a service request form.
• You may also visit our web site directly to learn more about our capabilities.

We are committed to building the value of the Stellar Phoenix brand and we stand behind our service to you. We want to earn your trust and confidence as your “go-to source” when you have data retrieval challenges.

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