Should I let my friend or IT department look at my failed hard drive?
This question is asked by clients from time to time and although well meaning it is not a course of action that we would recommend you take.
If you allow a friend or mate to look at your damaged hard drive will they have sufficient knowledge and tools to be able to repair the damaged media? Do they have low level access to the firmware modules, highly unlikely in fact impossible, would they know an electronic failure to firmware failure? Some faults can exhibit with similar issues any changes the PCB will not help at all in fact it could hamper the recovery or worse still destroy your data!
Do they have a dedicated clean room? Again not likely as theses cost serious money to setup and maintain, even then head replacement particularly for the WD Western Digital range of hard drives is a very difficult task to achieve and takes years of research to master this area of data recovery.
Surely the IT department can tackle this?
No they cannot, again they will not have access to the equipment and skills required to perform data recovery to a failed hard drive, sure they may have downloaded some free data recovery software, this software will only help if 1. The hard drive is functioning correctly and is detected by the BIOS or operating system, 2. You do not install directly on the failed or failing data set, and 3. Very often will take a cursory look at the logical system often with unsatisfactory results, hexadecimal knowledge and an innate understanding of operating and file systems is required as often clients will complain that the friend or IT department recovered data that is in a RAW state, that is no folder or file structure or filenames often the data will not launch and is logically corrupt.
Failed DIY attempts at data recovery are on the increase from computer users who feel that they are the friend or IT department can recover the data for free, often these failed attempts render the hard drive unrecoverable even for us, so please do not attempt this simply switch off your hard drive and ship it or have our courier collect it for a free diagnosis and quotation for recovery.
Worst case scenario or a recent case study a large origination based in Wales attempted to recover data from a seriously damaged WD laptop hard drive, this hard drive had been accidentally dropped while on, the surface or platters were very badly damaged, the heads had failed, however the organization opened the hard drive up in non clean room conditions and touched the disk surface with their bare hands, introducing grease dirt and other contaminates into the disk, they also attempted to move the heads by hand after they had crashed on the drive source, this further scraped the surface of the drive.
After inspecting the drive in our clean room lab we cleaned up the disk surface and replaced the failed hard drive heads with good working parts, further to this the system area or SA was also damaged very badly this area contains all the uniqueness of a particular hard drive and is required to gain access to the user data area, after extensive work the firmware was repaired and a clone was made of all good surfaces and areas of the damaged hard drive, further to this the file system was rebuilt and a folder and file lsit was sent to the client, over 90% of the data.