Hard drive failure or corruption is an infuriating problem. Composed of a substrate and a magnetic medium, hard drives (or rigid platters) are destined to fail or malfunction due to wear and tear. Apart from this, there are several other external factors which can lead to a premature failure including excessive heat, exposure to water or towering magnetic fields, uneven power supply, environmental contamination, corrupted operating system files e.g., NTLDR, boot.ini, ms-dos.sys, or a physical impact, just to name a few.
As soon as the failure occurs, accessing the stored information becomes a mammoth task for the user, however, with a professional intervention such as of a reputable professional hard drive data recovery service, nearly 100% of data can be recovered from the internal or external hard drive sans difficulties.
Before this, we’re going to help by preparing for the worst by bringing to your attention the reasons of hard drive failure (in detail), the preventive measures, and possible data recovery solutions one should be wary of.
Causes of Hard Drive failure
First and foremost, one needs to do is figure out if the crash is provoked by a physical or a logical failure. As tricky at it seems, a Windows Check Disk tool can prove extremely beneficial in examining the disk health; this powerful and utility package monitors the Hard Drive and allows the user to know about the potential issues before they occur.
When a computer crashes, it will not boot to the operating system. Similar errors are detected if the overall hard drive crash is caused owing to two prime reasons; physical or logical failure.
Physical Hard Drive Failure
Given that, the computer will not boot and the end-user observes an uncomfortable grinding, clicking or whirring noise; chances are high that the system has encountered a physical drive failure. Many factors can contribute to physical failure, including platter damages, firmware or manufacture faults.
At this juncture, one should avoid following two steps at all costs,
- Booting the computer
- Reloading the operating system
Also, in such situation, one should refrain from starting the computer and copying the files to an external drive as it might put additional stress on the dying hardware.
Ergo, such data recovery services utilize the environment, wherein, recovery will be 100% safe and secure; attributes like integrity, structure etc. will be maintained.
Logical Hard Drive Failure
The case of a logical failure arises when one is not able to boot the operating system (OS), and the reasons are many; from virus attack, system driver conflict, software malfunction to human error. When this type of failure occurs, reinstalling the windows or running common OS tools such as CHKDSK can worsen the condition.
Recovery solution: Since such errors are hard to solve, using a robust stellar windows data recovery software is advisable. Such software will deeply scan and recover (and restore) the corrupted files from the corrupted, formatted, encrypted inaccessible hard drive.
Preventive measures of Hard Drive Failure
Inevitably, hard drives will die. However, with a proactive-care approach, one can avail a host of benefits such as increased hard drive life, reduced user downtime etc.
Steps should be taken to prevent a premature hard disk death. Following are few preventative measures to take care of the drive’s health.
- Preventing the most common hard drive failure causes (related to environment, stress or electrical) is the key. Protection against electrical dangers that stem from power loss and fluctuations, electrostatic discharges etc. is absolutely essential.
- Carrying hard drive around in a bag, as a daily wardrobe essential can result in permanent damage. Also, avoid unplugging it or lifting it while it is still spinning.
- Keeping the systems under a zero-circulation environment can result in a reduced lifespan. One should place their machines in properly ventilated spaces where the risk of heating up is cut down to a minimum. As a matter of fact, the hard drive should be mounted in a proper case with a decent PSU and sufficient cooling.
- Errors like software issues, partition table issues, bad sectors, lost clusters, cross-linked files, and/or directory errors and more can be handled well by Windows CHKSDK program.
- The data load on hard drives should be minimal; it will help in extending the lifecycle of the Hard Drive by minimizing wear and tear. Simply put, unwanted or unused files and programs should be removed.
Conclusion
For those who prefer solving hard drive related issues on their own should think again as it can do more harm than good. In order to execute a successful hard drive recovery, a professional intervention is necessary. An experienced hard drive data recovery service can help in recovering the data lost by accidental data deletion, device corruption, and other data loss situation in a safe and efficient manner.
So, it goes without saying that consulting an experienced data recovery service will serve the purpose best. One such service is Stellar Data Recovery. Stellar has devised a bountiful of unique hard disk data recovery techniques for recovering maximum data such as valuable documents, pictures, emails etc. from the damaged, crashed, undetected and formatted external hard drive.
Why Stellar?
Being one of the forerunners in the data recovery industry in India, Stellar Data Recovery (an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified company, has 15 branches across India) has been providing a data recovery services & solutions since 1993. Stellar data recovery has turned out to be the unrivaled choice of customers by and large.
