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Listen, before you go through this piece of article let me clarify one thing: courage to do a data recovery job, makes one ignore the basic rule of computing that all hard drives eventually fail. And this also teaches a lesson to all those who had not backed up their data, everybody has to learn this lesson once. So here is what you can do now!

Actually, the first of all you need to find out if it really is a hard-drive failure you’re facing, and not one of the numerous other equipment problems that can cause a boot failure. If you have access to another pc, take away the failed hard drive from your sick PC, and connect it as a secondary drive to the alternate pc. The simplest way to do this is through a USB universal drive adapter—it will cost you approx. $30 and is an excellent device to have around for all kinds of hard-drive issues.

On a Mac, the procedure is a bit easier. You can simply use a FireWire cable to hook your sick Mac to a working Mac, then, “target boot” the nonworking Mac by pressing down the T key as you power it on. With either technique, it’s feasible that your failed hard drive will turn up on your working Pc and disclose its files, in which case your hard drive is perhaps okay but your operating system has to be reinstalled. (Don’t forget to pass on your files before you do that.)

If your files don’t turn up on the secondary computer, then you are at one of those critical moments in life when you realize how much your hard slog and precious memories are really worth to you. Based upon how your drive is ruined an effort to recover your data can cost anywhere from a hundred dollars to several thousand. What’s more, the procedure can take days—and there is no guarantee that the cash and time you put in will bring any results whatsoever.

Now that we’ve experienced the disappointing task of appropriately setting our probabilities, here’s the good news: Very often, the data on failed drives is recoverable. Actually, it’s amazing how durable that information can be—just ask any business embezzler who thought he had deleted all the facts from his PC, only to have it embarrass later in court. The judgment is apt, since the very same computer forensic tools that expose digital crime are the ones that can stumble on your cherished family photos.

There are two ways that drives break down into:
Logical failure
Mechanical failure
In a logical failure, the drive’s modules are actually undamaged, but because of either inadvertent formatting or a corrupt file system, the drive is not able to discover and plot a course towards its own data. Though, unless it has been overwritten, that data is still present on your drive.

A mechanical failure indicates that your drive has broken parts that stop it from working—broken drives often make a telltale clicking sound as they uselessly try to access their files. If you hear that, your data may still be there, but you’re not getting it back without calling in the professionals (see “Worst-Case Scenario”). And those professionals make good money. Data recovery services from Kroll Ontrack, Seagate’s i365 and Iomega charge between $500 and $2500 to try to recover data from either logical or mechanical failures, based on the severity of the situation. But if you are just ahead of a logical failure, you can get your files back on your own without spending a penny or for a few dollars.

We just attempted a data recovery from the failed drive of a coworker whose 120 GB MacBook drive had suddenly collapsed. We took away the drive from his laptop, and then used our USB drive adapter to connect it to a desktop computer for analysis. We didn’t hear any sounds that meant a really dead drive, so our initial step was to download the free demo diagnostic tool at Prosoft Engineering to verify what might be recoverable. Several companies offer demos that will look into your drive and provide you a pretty good idea of what’s recoverable before you give up money to purchase their software.

Once the evaluation showed we’d get fine results, we used Prosoft’s Data Rescue II software ($99), which is customized for the Mac OS and Mac-formatted drives. There are far more choices for PC owners, including Prosoft’s Data Rescue PC ($99), as well as Ontrack EasyRecovery DataRecovery ($199) and RecoverMyFiles ($60) from GetData.

Nearly all of these products work in a comparable mode. Install the software, choose the flawed drive as your source and opt a destination folder to collect the data. (Take care your recovery drive has sufficient space for the contents of your failed drive.) Then you have to wait, and wait. A complete scan and upturn of our 120 GB drive took four days, and a bigger drive could take longer.

Recovering a hard drive is somewhat like getting back a stolen automobile; you’ll be pleased to have your files back, but the consequences could be chaotic. No data recovery plan will return your files to you in just the order you initially kept them. These plans are made to fundamentally do a data deposit from your flawed drive to a fresh drive. Files will be prearranged by type (JPEG images will be in one folder, Word documents in some other folder, MPEG movies in another) and your songs and photos will be mixed with haphazard sound and image files from your computer’s system folder.

Moreover, the names of all your files will have been modified to a mixed range of alphanumeric sequences, for example IMG1039.jpg or MOV2010.mov. So get ready to resolve al this for a long weekend of sorting through and renaming your files. Oh, and while you’re at it, now’s a good time to purchase that backup drive.

Worst-Case Situation

We took two drives and messed ‘em up good, then sent them to the pros. By Glenn Derene

What if your hard drive is suffering from something a bit worse than your everyday hard-drive crash? How much scratch can your data take before it’s gone forever? We tried to discover what could be recovered from a computer that had been through a natural failure so we replicated a really bad one. We settled upon an earthquake/flood doomsday situation. Initially we took two laptop drives, loaded them with test movie and music files, and then banged the heck out of them until we heard the cross clicking of mechanical hard-drive failure. Then we inundated one of the drives in custom-built storm-surge floodwaters (salt water, construction debris, oil) and let it saturate for four days.

We sent both hard drives to Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery, which sells data-rescue services to both corporate clients and consumers. Ontrack’s Jeff Pederson evaluated the drives in the company’s sparkling room and discovered that the read/write heads in our dry drive were bent from our abuse and that we had rubbed the platters. Our flooded drive was damp but the platters were unharmed. Pederson restored the heads and performed a recovery.

The results: Pederson had saved 99 % of the data from the dry drive and 100 % from the flooded drive. Had we been paying clients, the service would have cost us $1200 each.