Hard Drive
Data Recovery

Following are the symptoms of failed hard disk:

• Hard disk is undetectable or not recognized by the system.
• The system fails to boot or hang in middle of the booting process.
• System BIOS is unable to detect the hard drive.
• Hard Drive isn't spinning.

Given below are some of the symptoms of a failing hard drive:

• Clicking sound or unusual noise produced by HDD.
• Files are missing.
• Locking up during the boot process - hard disk problems are indicated if this happens frequently.
• The computer often freezes, and needs forced restart.
• System shows sluggish performance. You can't speed up computer performance even by applying optimization tricks.
• Increase in the number of bad sectors noted when running "chkdsk" command.
• Hard disk getting overheated.

If you observe these symptoms, you must stop using the drive to prevent further damage and contact a data recovery expert.

Some common reasons for hard disk failure are:

• Overheating of HDD
• Virus attack
• Bad sectors
• Adverse environmental conditions—dust, heat, moisture
• Jerks and falls

Physical Hard Disk failure: - As the name suggests any kind of physical damage to the hard disk can make it nonfunctional. Given below are the symptoms of a physically failed or failing HDD:

• Computer not detecting the Hard disk
• Drive not spinning (no power)
• An abnormal ticking noise whilst the drive is reading data
• A loud clicking or grinding noise

You must not try to recover data on your own in case the drive is physically crashed. It needs expertise and specialized resources to recover data from a physically crashed disk

Logical Hard disk Failure: - A drive is said to have logical failure if its firmware or file system gets corrupted. Symptoms of logical failure of HDD are:

• Computer BIOS see hard disk drive but the data is not accessible.
• Data couldn't be accessed.
• Files are missing.

It’s recommended to replace the HDD if it has a lot of bad sectors as it may lead to HDD failure. You can run CHKDSK command from command prompt which reallocates bad sectors so that the data that you store the next time isn’t stored on those bad sectors. Running CHKDSK might result in permanent data loss as the command “marks” bad sectors. Once “marked” data could never be read/written from those sectors. Means, any data stored on sectors marked by CHKDSK would be permanently gone.

If your hard drive has bad sectors and you’ve lost data, consult a data recovery professional to recover you precious data.

It’s best to contact a Professional Data Recovery Service provider in case of a crashed hard disk. Using hit-and-trial methods to recover data from a crashed hard drive might result in permanent data loss.

Hard disks are fragile. Jerks and falls may cause damage to hard drive components such as platters, read/write arm, spindle, etc. To recover data from a damaged hard drive, you need to contact a data recovery expert.