External Hard Drive Recovery


External Hard Drive Recovery refers to the retrieval of lost data on a computer’s external hard drive. Data loss is a very misunderstood concept, and very little information has been made available to the public about data loss. The little information that is available is inconsistent, and due to mixed messages, users will find it difficult to evaluate their data loss situations, and will make educated decisions to try and recover it.

Most data lost on a hard drive is not lost at all, the user has simply been unable to access it. Because users are not aware of their options, many gigabytes of data have been lost and the user has given up any hope of recovery.

Physical damage will always cause some data loss, and in most cases the logical structures of the file system are damaged as well. Logical damage must be dealt with before any files can be recovered.

Logical damage is mainly caused by power outages which prevent file system structures from being completely written to the storage medium. This can leave the file system in an inconsistent state, which in turn can cause a variety of problems such as infinitely recursion directories, drives that report negative amounts of free space, system crashes or an actual loss of data.

Various programs exist to correct these problems, and most operating systems will have a rudimentary repair tool for their native file systems.

Many computer users rely on back-ups and redundant storage technologies in the event of data loss, and for many of them these back-up and storage plans worked okay. Back-up software can become corrupted, and users accidentally backup corrupted or incorrect information. Backups are not infallible and should not be solely relied upon.

Laptops, desktops, personal computers and digital cameras and all spinning magnetic media can fail from the following:

o Invalid disk system

o BIOS error message

o Noisy hard drive disk

o Logical corruption to the file system

In data recovery labs, highly qualified engineers look closely at all components both internally and externally. If a failed component is discovered it is replaced and the hard drive retested to functionality. This is then moved to a cloning and imaging department where an image is created of the media from the beginning to the end of the user data area.

Typical errors of a hard disk can include overheating of the spindle motor chip which is self evident by visual inspection of the PCB.


Source by John Cheesman