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How should you handle physically damaged hard drives in St. Petersburg?

Most businesses in St. Petersburg have, at one time or another, experienced the abject misery and inconvenience of a damaged hard drive. Many of these failures are caused by direct and blunt impact to the hard drive, such as tipping over or getting dropped.

The procedural panic of a hard drive failure can be severe, and the primary objective of post-damage operations should be to preserve whatever data you can from the compromised hard drive. In doing so, there are a few things you should and shouldn’t do in the physical handling of the drive itself.


Stop running all software

Once it’s apparent that your hard drive has suffered physical damage, shut down all active software programs if you can and don’t allow them to operate. Running software on the drive can keep causing damage to your drive and interfere with the process of recovering the data. At this point, you need to switch gears from productivity to saving what data you can.


Don’t run any file utilities

Disk utility programs help to identify and repair bad sectors and file corruption issues on your hard drive—but they are powerless if your drive has mechanical issues. Even worse, running file utilities on a damaged drive can harm your data by putting your drive’s read-write heads into direct contact with the platters, putting potentially recoverable data at more risk.


Shut the computer down

When you perceive some of the physical symptoms of hard drive damage—clicking or whirring noises, heavy vibrations, or anything that seems physically off—shut down the power. It’s difficult for more damage to occur if you stop all the moving parts.


Survey your recovery options

If the damage to your hard drive has advanced to the point where you’re hearing those physical symptoms, most likely your physical hard drive is in irreparable condition and can’t be fully recovered. In that instance, it’s necessary to retain the services of a computer professional who can save your data and copy it to a new drive. These services can be a bit expensive, but if they’re done by a business with certified credentials from Microsoft of Apple, they should be able to save most if not all your data.


Fully destroy the old hard drive

Even if you can no longer employ the services of your hard drive, the data doesn’t simply vanish. It’s still there and can still be accessed by experts intent on using (and misusing) that information. The only way to ensure that the old data never gets public is by hiring a professional service that completely shreds and destroys old technology components.


Your St. Petersburg business can avoid the risk of exposed data from damaged hard drives with the destruction services of ShredQuick. Call or contact us online to find out more.

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