What to do when your harddrive crashes

About 44% of all data that is loss from computer systems is because there has been failure in the hardware that is being used.  When this occurs the first thing a person should do is shut down their system especially if they think that their hard drive has actually crashed.  When you do think that your hard drive has crashed then you should not go through the normal procedures to close down the system, but instead you should just turn it of at the main switch and unplug it.  Also it is important that you do not run any kind of off the shelf hard drive data recovery software or other drive utilities that are already on the machine. 

Unfortunately what you will find is that many of these applications that you have already on your machine are going to think that the drive is working correctly.  This in turn is going to risk the chances of the data being lost permanently.  Instead it is time to start consider getting a data recovery specialist in. 

Normally what these specialists do is carry out a scan of the drive and then perform any repairs to the files in the system which have become corrupted.  In some cases it may be just a case of a partition being repaired and this will then restore the drive back to its original status before it failed.  However if this is not the case then they will use a low level scan that inspects every part of the hard drive for files and once they are located they are then able to copy them to either a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or even another hard drive.  In most cases when carrying out such work a specialist will often put aside one day in order that the hard drive can be scanned completely and a further day in which they will be able to recover the files.

However if the failure to the hard drive has been caused by a physical rather than logical problem it makes the process of actually recovering the data from the hard drive a bit more difficult and more of a challenge for the specialist.  Normally physical failure is caused either by a mechanical or electronic problem.  But in order to help with this type of hard drive data recovery a specialist will also need to have the right components available to them which will help to get the drive functioning once more. 

In most cases it will take between 5 and 10 business days for a specialist to carry out hard drive data recovery on a drive which has physical problems compared to only 2 to 4 days if the problem is of a logical nature.  But which ever problem it is you will end up having to pay for this problem to be sorted so you need to factor in such costs to your budgets when purchasing any kind of data storage equipment for your business.