Hard Drive Repair and Recovery

Hard Drive Failure

A Hard Drive is the part of your computer that retains the data that you save. That data can be a word processing document, picture, movie, program, etc... There are many reason why your hard drive will just give up and fail.
Zepps Home Computer Repair lists the top 3 here.

1. You over filled the Hard Drive
This especially happens in older hard drives that have less then 20 GB (Gigabits). You lose track of what "free space" you have left and you fill it. This plays havok with regular Operating system(Windows, OSX) fuctions usually becuase there is not enough room for the paging file (the space used to execute operations to RAM). Thsi causes the system to freeze up and sometimes leads to a Blue screen error. Sorry if thats a little to jargony for beginners.

2. Power spike
Everyone has seen a power failure in there lifetime. It just happens. This can completely destroy any data on that hard drive. The main reason that this can even happen is that the computer is not plugged into a surge protector. ALWAYS USE A SURGE PROTECTOR. A surge protector contains a resister that absorbs power spikes.

3. Heat and Temperature Change
Heat is a computers mortal enemy. This is why your computer makes a humming noise. A cooling system(usually a series of fans) is installed in the unit to keep it a it prime working temperature. There usually one fan located on the CPU and one in the power supply. Sometimes there are fans in the back of the computer too. Fans work in conjuction with "Heat sinks" (they look like a rigged piece of metal on the CPU)to draw the heat aways from viral components. The other problem is temperature change which leads to condinsation. The cold itself is GREAT for your computer. But when you combine it with an increase of heat it can lead to water buildup inside your computer. Ok I know I said heat is the worst enemy, it's probably more of a tie between heat and water.




Now I lumped a variety of issues into 3 catagories, to point out that "1" is really the only completely recoverable data. Sometimes with power spikes you can get lucky and most of the data can still be saved. When your "hard drive fries" due to heat it is usally DOA.

Recovering data
The best way to recover data is to restore it from a backup. ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS. Programs can always be reinstalled but unique data can not. Of course if you dont back up your work, there are ways to retrieve files. The easiest of which is "Slaving" the affect hard drive to a working hard drive and tranfering data through commands in the shell. In laymen terms, copy data from a bad hard drive to a good hard drive. For the hardcore and most dire circumstances I can send the hard drive to a lab for recovery. In the lab they move the cylinders (spinning discs inside the hard drive) to a working casing and try running it then. This costs..how should I put it... ALOT. It rivals the costs of a New Computer.


I hope that helps some of you understand whats going on. I tried to keep it as simple as I can.

Nick Zeppetello
Zepps Home Computer Repair