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First Steps in Hard Drive Recovery

If you find that your hard drive is no longer functioning, remember that a hard drive recovery is nearly always possible, so there is no need for panic. Data loss is not unusual and in nearly all cases the data can be recovered. Only in severe severe cases involving platter damage, magnetic degradation, or over-write of a file will the data be practically unrecoverable, and even in these cases a hard drive recovery by MFM photography may be possible if the data is valuable enough to justify huge expense.

Having said that, there are steps you can take to minimize further data loss and greatly increase your chances of successful hard drive recovery

Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery after a 'crash'

If you find that you are unable to boot to the operating system, and you can no longer see the hard drive in the BIOS, there is a strong possibility that your hard drive has crashed. In this case you should shut the whole system down immediately. If there is some physical problem with the hard drive, it will be made a lot worse if you run power through the hard drive attempting to reboot the system.

If the head stack inside your drive is damaged, trying to run it will cause additional damage to the surfaces of the platters in your hard drive, and this is where the data you are wanting to recover is stored.

Initial Steps in Hard Drive Recovery after Corruption

If you have accidentally reformatted your hard drive, or accidentally deleted a file or folder, once again you must not write any new information onto your drive. The files you have deleted are still intact somewhere on the drive. Deleting a file simply means removing the location tag for that file, allowing that area of the drive to be over-written. If you add any new data it is possible that it will over-write your lost data effectively losing it forever.

If you believe a partition has become corrupted on your hard drive, it is very important not to try and re-install your operating system or add any new data to the drive.

If you have accidentally deleted a partition, attempting to restore it by formatting the drive will not recover your data, it will only result in the addition of an empty partition.

If you experience a single file corruption, any attempt to create a new file with the same name will partially over-write the file, greatly decreasing your chances of a full recovery.

This is just a short selection of the more common reasons for losing data from your hard drive, and illustrates that some attempts made by you, or even an IT technician, to recover a file or drive could decrease the chances of subsequent professional recovery efforts, or even make a successful recovery impossible. If you have any doubts about what action to take, just ask yourself this question: "Am I prepared to lose that data? ".

Andrew Whitehead is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular Amazon S3 based tool for online file backup -- Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/initial-steps-in-hard-drive-recovery.html