How to Approach Recovery in Cases of Physical Media Corruption or Damage

Like any other storage media, hard drives may fail in myriad ways. There are some definitive signs that may come as early warnings. Sometimes, the damage can be seen on chips and connectors on the exterior of your drive. If the damage is not visible, your drive may produce a loud clicking noise when accessed. A physically damaged drive may even fail to show up in Windows Disk Management. Some possible types of physical hard drive damages are listed below:

• Head Crash

The hard drive head is responsible for reading and writing data on its magnetic plates. If these plates have developed scratches, the movement of the head on them will emit an unusual noise. This may affect the functioning of head and result in data damage.

• Bad Sectors on Hard Drive

Bad sectors may result due to wear and tear of the hard drive over time. When attempting to read data from these sectors, the drive stops working and the computer hangs. A weird sound is also heard when the corrupt sectors are scanned on the drive.

• Logical Board Failure

This type of failure includes broken power or data connectors, spindle or arm driver chip failure, and the like. Such cases require replacement of the logic board or a chip.

• Damage Due to Lesser Storage Space

When the amount of data stored on your drive exceeds its maximum storage limit, the hard drive uses virtual memory for processing system tasks through a technique called paging. This increases the disk activity and indeed makes it susceptible to failures.

All incidents of physical hard drive failures can quickly turn into big data disasters, if you do not seek professional expertise. Internal recovery efforts in these cases may lead to more damage and permanent data loss. If your data is important, you should immediately send the troubled media to an expert data recovery service provider. Through rigorous research and years of experience, these companies have gained expertise in dealing with all cases of physical media damage.

Data recovery from physically damaged media should be performed in Clean Room environment. Data recovery providers open the case of your hard drive in CLASS 100 Clean Room labs to prevent any further damage to the magnetic substance on the drive. These labs are anti-static, dust-free, and highly sterile. Furthermore, the data recovery service providers use leading-edge, proprietary technology to solve simple as well as complex cases of physical data loss.