Step-by-step recovery guides based on the hardware that has failed, as well as common errors – what to do, and what to avoid, the instant a drive gives out.
More data will be lost after the disk fails than during the failure itself, simply by continuing without stopping. Stopping is the best action you can take.
The amount of time you have will determine everything else on this page, therefore begin there.
Minutes — the device is making a noise. The disk clicks, grinds or scrapes, or it buzzes but does not spin. Stop reading further and turn it off; each pass around the disk results in additional damage and nothing on this page is more important. Once turned off read why your hard drive is clicking.
Hours — files were deleted from an SSD. The TRIM command removes data from an SSD’s free space as long as the drive has power. At this point, if you turn off your computer immediately, anything the drive had not yet erased will survive. More about how SSDs are different from other types of drives.
Days — the drive is slow and throwing errors. Data can still be read at this point and for an unknown amount of time after. The longer you wait, the higher the chance of losing the data permanently. Copy important files to another location now and start with the most important ones. How to determine if your hard drive is failing.
Weeks — deleted files on a healthy hard drive. As long as you do not use the drive, nothing will happen. Overwriting the existing data is necessary before anything happens. Think for a little bit because you have time. What actually works.
No hurry — the drive is dead but silent. A drive that does not spin has no deterioration. Faulty electronics and firmware leave the platters unblemished and there is no clock running.
Instead of a hardware list, the same four questions can be asked about both a memory card and a twelve-disk RAID array.
More often than not the wording used in these messages is more helpful for diagnosing the problem than people realise.
Roughly speaking, free software will recover what your drive still can read. Everything else requires hardware.
If a drive successfully mounts, runs quiet and can't find your data, then that's likely a software issue (a file was accidentally deleted, a partition went missing, the contents were formatted, or the index is corrupted). Reputable read-only data recovery tools are available for a fraction of the cost of any lab fee; installed to another drive they will resolve a good proportion of those issues, and we would rather tell you than take the work. This article explains what the free tiers actually cover.
The dividing line is physical condition, not difficulty. The minute a drive clicks, drops off the bus, stalls for thirty seconds at a time or reports incorrect capacity, software becomes destructive. A deep scan takes hours of continuous reading on hardware with limited reads remaining; drives often fail mid-recovery. No version of this issue is resolved by patience.
The four questions that put your case on one side or the other are discussed in software or a lab, and our data recovery cost and pricing structure is published so the comparison will be based upon a like-for-like basis.
All are circulating today and all have good reasons why they seem believable.
There is some history here — with thirty-year-old hard disk drives, cooling the drive sometimes reduced a jammed part enough to allow one more pass. With newer disks however, the freezing causes condensation on the disks when the drive heats up again during operation and also creates a wet area under the head fly space which is destructive. This remedy was marginally useful then and harmful now.
Reasonable because the boards look identical, and are secured by four screws. All modern hard disk drives contain adaptive calibration information, unique to each individual drive, stored in a ROM chip located on the circuit board. A donor board without the original calibration information stored in its ROM chip either has no effect or attempts to run the heads with the wrong calibration.
Chkdsk can repair your file system — and that's why everyone recommends using it. It will create a consistent file system. The way it creates a consistent file system is by either deleting or reducing in size those files that it could not resolve — as far as a failing drive goes, the very same files that a recovery requires.
Everyone likes rice when they get their phone wet, because it appears to work on phones. Phones are very resilient to short-term submersion. Rice pulls out some of the surface moisture, but none of the dissolved mineral and salt particles that cause corrosion to occur to the printed circuit board. A drive sent damp and sealed inside its own package is far superior to one that has been dried out.
We begin each recovery with a complimentary written diagnostic. We will let you know how much of the information we can recover from your damaged media, and also what the recovery will cost prior to taking one single penny. For most jobs, if the recovery fails, there is nothing to pay.