HARD DRIVE RECOVERY

Whether it’s due to overheating, water damage, malware, an accidental drop, infection with a computer virus, simply human error or aging equipment, hard drives do get compromised from time to time. The effect might be obvious – such as the hard drive crashing completely – or more subtle.

WE HAVE A NO RECOVERY – NO CHARGE POLICY.

SIGNS THAT YOUR HARD DRIVE MIGHT BE LOSING DATA AND NEEDS RECOVERY INCLUDE:

  • Clicking or grinding sounds coming from the drive
  • Error messages and prompts to format the disk
  • Slow booting and access times
  • Corrupted or missing files

In all of these instances, contacting a hard drive recovery service is your best option to retrieve lost data and prevent any further damage. In professional hands, it’s almost always possible to recover data from damaged hard drives.

Simply power down your machine, and send it in for diagnosis and get a free quote.

Remember that in the unlikely event that we can’t recover your data, there’s no charge involved. We can also help with external hard drive recovery. So you’ve got nothing to lose – contact us now!

HOW DOES HARD DISK DATA RECOVERY WORK?

Hard drives fail for one of two reasons – physical failure or logical failure. If you accidentally reformat the drive or lose a partition, that’s logical failure. And as the name implies, physical failure occurs when damage to the hard drive means it can’t function correctly or at all. This might be as a result of a drop or fall, an electrical surge, a manufacturing defect, or simple wear and tear.

For this reason, the process and hardware used will be different when you attempt to recover data from a formatted hard drive than when you recover data from a damaged hard drive, for example. Our hard drive recovery Cape Town experts make use of the latest tools and technologies for hard disk recovery:

  • A class 100 cleanroom environment. All hard drives contain fragile and delicate components, which are extremely sensitive to dust and debris. We use a clinical-grade certified class-100 (ISO 5) environment for all open drive work. This is one of the main reasons it’s so ill-advised to attempt to recover data from a damaged hard drive on your own.
  • Drive Imaging. One of the golden rules of HDD data recovery is that you should never run recovery utilities on your original media. That’s why we image or clone a virtual or hard copy to work on, so there’s no risk of original data being overwritten.
  • File Reconstruction. In most cases, only sections or parts of files are damaged or corrupted. Our team can reconstruct them so they function correctly again.

Skipping any of these steps means that data which was recoverable may be lost forever.

BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THIS FREE HARD DRIVE DATA RECOVERY SOFTWARE I SEE ONLINE?

If you Googled ‘hard drive recovery’ to get here, you almost certainly noticed some free software claiming it could do the job for you. And in the interest of transparency, we’re going to be honest with you here – if the data you’ve ‘lost’ isn’t critical to your business (such as one document you deleted from the recycle bin by mistake but can technically recreate if you really need to) then it might be worth giving free software a go. In virtually all other cases, it’s a really bad move, and you should be prepared for the extraction to not go as planned.

Here’s what you need to know:

  • If any kind of physical hardware damage is involved (such as a dropped laptop or suspected corrosion) choosing the right software may be crucial to getting your data and if this isn’t done properly, it can worsen the situation.
  • If the hard drive is in the process of failing, trying to install and run any software on it is going to make matters worse.
  • If you’re not sure why you can’t recover your data, you’re taking a big risk by guessing what the problem is. installing software, changing or adding files to the hard drive that you need to recover data from will, most likely, make it more difficult or even impossible to recover data from. If your data is valuable to you or your business, then it’s simply not a risk worth taking to try do hard drive data recovery yourself.

Rather get in touch with Data First straight away, and we’ll be happy to assist you. And remember: we have a no recovery – no charge policy. And be sure to check out our other data recovery services – including raid recovery and digital forensics.