Here are some symptoms which help us to recognize the type and level of hard drive failure.
- When system shows “unable to boot” error
- Drives become inaccessible
- The major applications become unable to run or load data
- Data corruption due to virus attack
- Hard disk parts or component damage
- Damage due to physical factors like Water , Dust etc.
- Accidental reformation of partition
- Accidental data deletion
In all the above cases there is a need of hard drive recovery .The very first step to resolve the above mentioned issues is to first diagnose the potential of recovery. At a Data Recovery Service Center first determine whether the media is accessible to the lab equipment. If so, the first thing needed to be done is to create a raw image of the data . Storage Media like hard drive can be recovered by deep analysis.
If in case, the media is inaccessible then the hard drive recovery specialist examine its internal health to determine the extent of physical damage.
To resolve the issue, sometimes it demands to replace the hard drive components in a (class 100 clean room) totally dust free environment and using specialized hardware and software tools to create the raw image. Some components typically include electronics, read/write heads, head assemblies, magnets & drive motors failure makes hard drive inaccessible.
In case of logical recovery, raw image is used for examining the low-level data sectors and determining what things can fix the problem. File system structures are also needed to get access to the important data. Sometimes the existing file system structures are too damaged to recover hard drive data and it has to be extracted directly from one or more fragments of the raw image.
Disk striping is a method of dividing data into several data blocks across different partitions on several hard disks which are used in a multiple hard disk systems such as RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). Each stripe in the disk stripping process is of the minimum size in the multiple hard disks. Because of an array of hard disks, the disk striping enhances the performance by using the hardware in all these drives in parallel.
Disk striping is an important tool to help you to recover your data if any of the disk fails in array. If more than one drive fails, the data becomes inaccessible and you need to opt for Hard Drive Recovery software to get the data.
The Server versions of MS Windows operating system (including Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003) enable you to set default hard drive striping with parity for redundancy. It can be done even without parity:
What happens in Striping with parity ?
In this mode the striping can b done with min 3 and max 32 hard drives. A single stripe on stripe set with the parity could be located on every physical disk. The space used used on hard drive for storing the parity information is equal to size of a partition in set.
Lets Discuss Striping without parity
The problem with this process is that it does not provide fault tolerance. In this method if any of disks in stripe gets damaged, the whole disk stripe would be lost. Here the stripe set is created on minimum 2 and maximum 32 disks. A single stripe on stripe set could be located on every physical disk. It provides excellent performance of all the Microsoft Windows disk management strategies.
In these situations, Hard Drive Recovery is required to solve the data loss situations. The recovery is best possible by using hard drive recovery software. They work in most of the data loss situations and retrieve all types of lost files, documents and other data.
In spite of so much of advanced technologies, it has not been yet possible to manufacture a hard drive with millions of sectors and without errors. Imperfections in hard drive can make the sectors inoperable. The problem in hard drive sector, generally hits as error while trying to access data on hard drive. This may lead to critical data loss and require Hard Drive Data Recovery solution.
Now a days the hard drives use Error Correcting Code or ECC to help you identify if errors take place and resolve them. However, ECC can not fix the physical problems in the hard drive. Generally such sectors which do not work and are known as bad sectors.
The hard drive sectors, which are bad and can not be used for storing the data, because they are not reliable to write data. It is thus required for your system to keep track of which hard drive sectors are bad and not to use them. The most excellent method for it needs to be done for hard drive for detecting and avoiding them. If the bad sectors aren't detected before they've been written, data may lost.
To ensure maximum reliability the hard drives are tested systematically to reduce the chances of failure. The method of identifying and removing hard drive bad sectors are known as defect mapping. When bad sectors occur on the drive, you may also feel that your system performance is decreasing.
Bad sectors on the modern hard drive are generally an indication of critical problems with the drive. If a newly purchased hard drive has bad sector, get it exchanged. If you see bad sectors on the older hard drives while scanning the drive, this must be fixed. The bad sectors in the hard drives can be handled by using hard drive data recovery to be handled.
Hard drive recovery software are to solve the logical data loss problems. By using these software an image of the drive is created for recovery of data on bad sectors of the hard drive. The hard drive data recovery software provides a user friendly and safe method get the lost data back.
