10 Most common mistakes when people try to recover data themselves.

November 19th, 2008 |

Common Mistakes When Attempting to Recover Data Yourself

It sounds self serving, but if you could see how many hard disks we get in that have unrecoverable sections caused by user error, you’d understand why we say that data recovery by a professional is recommended if you really care about your data. Often, there is a limited window (number of attempts) to retrieve data from a failing hard drive, and using those up with unsuccessful attempts only costs you more in the long run – often the price you pay is lost data. It hurts that much more to know you could have had it back but for the home attempts to recover. That said, if you want to try to recover data yourself. . .

Here are our top 10 data recovery mistakes to avoid:

Under NO circumstances open the top of the drive. Exposing the internal workings to the outside world will destroy your chances of recovery in every case. If you need to have your drive opened for a recovery, send it to us for clean room service. Your drive can be taken apart safely in a class 100 clean room environment. Hint: no matter how clean you think your office is, it’s not clean enough.
Do not reformat media. Reformatting the media overwrites the master boot record and disconnects the directories and files, making my job more difficult. Sensing a trend here? The more the drive is messed up, the more hours it takes me to recover your data, and the more money you pay to get the pictures of your kids’ first birthday back.
Never repartition the media. Repartitioning also disconnects the master boot record and directory structure and means more time in the lab reconstructing both.
Avoid temperature extremes. Never put your drive in the fridge or freezer. There seems to be a myth out there that this helps, however it can cause condensation of water on the platters and when you turn on the drive, this can lead to catastrophic drive failure (scratched platters) and make it even more expensive to repair. Also, never heat your drive in the oven. Some nitwit on the internet posted this as a method to evenly heat the circuitry. However, chips are encased in a polymer that melts, causing irreversible & unrecoverable damage.
Do not ignore the problem. If your drive fails to boot up ONCE, make a phone call.
Do not continue to use the drive once it starts exhibiting problems. No matter how far behind you are on that deadline, it’s not going to get any better. Hard drives do not sound like Morse Code unless something is very wrong.
Do not run scan disk, defrag, chkdsk, fsck etc. on your failing drive. Essentially, this shreds your data.
Avoid off-the-shelf software. These programs work best for situations when you accidentally deleted something, not for a malfunctioning hard disk.
Do not, under any circumstances, while running or not, shake or hit the drive. This can lead to irreparable damage. This would seem like something I don’t have to tell you, but you’d be surprised how many people use the old “kick it and see if that fixes it” mentality.
Finally, do not immerse in water. Water will destroy your drive. Why? Hard disks are exposed to the air so they can properly maintain a pressure inside the drive. Water will seep inside the drive and corrode the surface.