External Drives Data Recovery

A wide variety of failures can propel severe external or physical damage to drives and storage media. When the drive is physically damaged, a greater level of precaution needs to be exercised in order to ensure that the data is still recoverable. To clarify your understanding, external hard drive data recovery means the process of recovering data from external hard drives like USB or Fire wire when the data is neither lost nor inaccessible because of some reason or the other. External hard drive data recovery process comprises the same process followed while trying to recover some lost files. Let's take the example of the ICD-ROMs which may get damaged because their metallic substrate is scratched.

Keep in mind that hard disks can suffer any of several mechanical failures, such as head crashes. There can be a case of failed motors so physical damage always causes at least some minimal case of data loss.

Most physical damaged drives cannot be repaired by the end users. For example, opening a hard disk in a normal environment is a complete no-no because the dust would obviously settle on the surface. If that happens, that could worsen the damage caused to the platters and complicate the external drive data recovery process even further.

The difficulty is that most users aren't experts nor do they have the hardware or technical expertise required to make these repairs. So it is best to opt for data recovery companies to do the job rather than make costlier mistakes that complicate data recovery processes further. Most professionals use Class 100 clean room facilities to protect the media while repairs are being made. How this is done is discussed herein.

The extracted raw image is used to reconstruct data that can be used after any repair of the logical damage is carried out. Once the repair is complete, the files may be in usable form although its actual recovery may turn out to be very incomplete.

Some helpful examples of physical recovery procedures include removing a damaged PCB (printed circuit board) and replacing it with a matching PCB from a healthy drive. Other good examples comprise changing the original damaged read/write head assembly with matching parts from a healthy drive, removing the hard disk platters from the original damaged drive and installing them into a drive that works fine. As these procedures are technical in nature, it is best that these are taken care of by professionals and not by untrained persons.

When the hard drive is physically damaged, remember that any additional access to the same drive would definitely corrupt data. This would make it much more difficult to get information back. Note that if the damaged drive happens to be the drive containing the operating system, don't consider trying to boot the drive. But for a desktop, there is less cause for worry as all you must do is disconnect the boot drive and replace it with a new drive. A tip for you is that do ensure the drive can accommodate the image of the current drive.

Next, an operating system can be easily installed on the new drive. You just need to reconnect the old drive or put it in an external case and connect via USB or FireWire.

In creating a new primary drive, you would be able to run the disk imaging software from the new drive. This way, you would be able to prevent the need for any writing to the old drive. If your hard drive works in a RAID system, you need a service that specializes in RAID data recovery as it wont be a good idea to do it on your own.

When a hard drive is prepared for its initial use, the drive is magnetized. This is done with a number of self-synchronizing magnetic bits. The purpose of this self-synchronizing structure is that, no matter where the hard disk is in its rotation cycle, the hard drive controller would be able to speedily touch down as to which of these bits represent no-man's land, which of these actually represent the drive's formatting, and which represent critical data.

Various situation based examples were discussed to clarify your queries on external data drive recovery. So do utilize this informative discussion sometime when you come across data problems on your external hard drive.