Why You Should Not Attempt a "Do It Yourself" Data Recovery
By Andrea Stone
Data recovery is a highly specialized and complicated procedure. Care must be taken to prevent the disturbance of the fragile components that reside in a hard drive or other media. For this reason, data recovery can be expensive. Many people receive a price quote from a data recovery company and in an effort to save costs, they decide to take matters into their own hands. This can be a fatal mistake for your data. By taking matters into your own hands, you could cause damage that can make the data irretrievable even by a data recovery company. Listed below are some common techniques that can cause permanent data loss:
Do Not Run Partitioning Software on the Failed Media
Using disk repair software can cause irreversible data loss. Most of these utilities write to the disk which can cause your data to be overwritten. The steps taken by most of these utilities are very complex. It only takes one incorrect option chosen, and you could damage the file structure of your disk beyond repair. By using these utilities, you are taking a significant risk with your data.
Do Not Reformat the Failed Media
This is crucial as reformatted disks make data recovery very difficult. A reformat allows the master boot record to be overwritten. It is important not change partition information or initialize the disk if prompted.
Do Not Open a Failed Hard Drive to Attempt Recovery
Many people do not understand the delicacy of the internal components of a hard drive. A hard drive should never be opened unless in a clean room environment. Inside the drive, there are platters which hold the data. These platters are made of either light aluminum alloy, glass or ceramic and are coated with a magnetizable substance. There can be one or multiple platters depending on the disk capacity. The disk platters are very fragile and sensitive to dust, debris and fingerprints.