What to do when your hard drive fails?

Did you recently lost your professional or personal data due to hard disk failure? Well, most of the times hard disk failure is the common cause for data loss. It normally occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed.

One of the main reasons why hard drive fails is because of worn out parts. Of course hard drive is just another mechanical device and probably today or some day later it will fail and lead to hard disk failure. In case when there is a manufacturing problem or defect they will fail within a short period of time. Also the severity of hard disk failure depends on different situations and if you are not so lucky, you might be a victim of hard drive head crash which is one of the worst case scenarios. If we know the time of hard disk failure we can prevent it, but such failures are unpredictable and you can never tell when exactly a hard disk failure may occur.

However, many organizations carefully plan out their hard drive data recovery as they might loss the data permanently if the crashed hard drive is not handled with expertise. So let’s find out what exactly we need to do when such unpredictable event of hard disk failure happens with us. First things first, never try to open the physically damaged hard drive as the dust particles in the air might further damage the hard drive platter. If your damaged hard disk is a boot disk or system disk, simply unplug it from the computer and detach the hard drive. Attempting to boot the system from this damaged disk might increase the chances of permanent data loss.

Swapping PCB (Printed Circuit Board) from healthy drive to damaged ones may also lead to further damage. If the hard disk failure is logical and related to file system you can try to retrieve the data through data recovery software that use advanced scanning mechanisms. If the damage is due to water, fire or vandalism than it is advisable not to power up the system as it would harm the magnetic layer of the hard disk. If the hard disk does not have any critical data you can retrieve it, but make sure you do not run any disk repair utility like ChkDsk in Windows and fsck in Mac.