Data Recovery
You go into your office Monday morning and boot up your computer. Your computer shows BIOS settings before announcing “operating system not found”. What happened to your hard drive? Are your files safe? How do you get them back?
The Hardware
In order to know what happened to your hard drive you must first understand how a hard data drive works. You can think of a hard data drive as a mini record that operates using magnets. Your data is magnetically written to a circular drive using a mechanical arm and read using the same mechanical arm. The firmware on the hard drive is responsible for telling the arm how to read and write to the drive. The circuitry on the hard drive is responsible for transmitting this data to the user, so the user may read and write to the drive.
How Does It Fail?
A hard drive can fail in three major ways, and how it fails determines the likelihood of your data being recoverable.
One of the most common ways are hard drive fails is that the arm goes bad. It might be loose or become off-kilter. When an arm is going bad you’ll usually hear a grinding coming from your computer. This is caused by the arm scraping against the disc and corrupting your data. The upside to this is that you often have ample warning before you’re data is so corrupted you can’t access any of it. The downside of this is if you wait too long the disc will become too corrupted and you will lose any opportunity you had to recovery your data.
Another common way a hard drive fails is that the circuitry that operates the arm goes bad. This usually happens quickly and without warning. Oftentimes when this happens the circuitry will let off an error code in the form of a series of beeps, which lets the user know exactly what in the circuitry failed. When the circuitry on the hard drive fails recovery is possible, but it does take a lot of work. In these cases the hard drive more than likely will have to be sent out to a third party that has a clean room available to them, so they can take out the discs storing all personal information and get the data off by circumventing the problem circuitry.
The firmware on the hard drive could also fail. Firmware is the software the circuitry uses to know how and where to store the data on the hard drive. This is often caused by a virus specifically designed to go after firmware. In these cases, though the firmware virus may be in your system for several days, weeks, or months, it’s near impossible to know it’s there without the proper antivirus in place. The hard drive crash comes fast and unexpectedly, with little to no time to backup data. However, in most cases, much like when the circuitry of the drive fails, data recovery is a high possibility.
How Can I Get My Data?
Depending on how your device failed and what component is going bad, you can recover in two different ways.
If the arm or circuitry is going bad, but the disc is not damaged (or only very lightly damaged) you may be able to get the data off your drive by using recovery software. Data recovery software works by ignoring the file paths your hard drive maps out. Instead, the software goes kilobyte by kilobyte, sector by sector, scanning the hard drive for any type of information. This is very helpful in finding information on the hard drive when the circuitry is going bad and writing to the drive incorrectly or if the arm is going bad and has trouble getting to the location of a certain file.
If the arm of the hard drive is too deteriorated or the integrity of the circuitry is too compromised, then you will not be able to pull information off of the disc. But fear not, your data may still be recoverable as long as the disc inside the hard drive is not damaged. In order to get access to your data you will have to take the hard drive apart in order to physically access the disk. This need to be done in a clean room under minimal light in order to preserve the disc. Then the exact firmware the hard drive used to write the data to the disc must be installed onto an artificial arm in order to safely remove the data from the drive. In most cases, the drive will need to be sent out to a third party specializing in data recovery.