Have you
ever dropped your hard drive on your desktop? Have your sprinklers caught fire
and activated? These and many more are the types of damage that a hard drive
can suffer that are known as physical damage and, believe it or not, your data
can survive it.
In this post
we will get to know both the technical terminology and the different phases of
data loss better. We will also find out if the data is recoverable after being
on the verge of death.
What is physical damage to devices?
Physical
damage can be described as damage resulting from the magnetic coating on the
hard drive platters being damaged or destroyed.
These
damages can occur to any storage device with moving parts. Our engineers can
detect them on CD and DVD drives, ZIP disks, floppy disks, and tapes.
Basically, the term "device damage" refers to any kind of failure in
the data storage media.
What are the most common causes?
Physical
damage to devices occurs, in most cases, when read / write heads come into
contact with spinning disks. While this may be due to the hard drive being
impacted or dropped while in operation, overuse and overheating can also be
contributing factors.
Discs can
also be damaged if the inner chamber becomes contaminated. Any substance
infiltrated inside the hard drive case can cause a "crash" if it gets
trapped between the heads and the drive.
How can I identify physical damage to
a hard drive?
Here are
some of the warning signs that can help you identify physical damage:
·
The
computer does not start or does not work properly (it takes time to open
files), displays data access error messages, or crashes the system with errors
·
When
the system accesses the hard drive, a clicking sound is heard. The common
pattern is click-pause-click-pause-click, hard drive stop and then the sound of
the disc spinning
·
When
it starts up, the hard disk does not emit any kind of noise (there is no sound
of spinning at high speed and there are no movements or vibrations).
If a hard drive is scratched, is the data recoverable?
This is a
question that is constantly being asked of our clean room engineers. The answer
is: data recovery is possible but sometimes it depends on the make of the hard drive and the severity of the damage.
The best way
to deal with this problem is by trying to understand the different types of
breakdowns. The severity of damage can be divided in three main categories:
Level 1 (C1)
Most of the
time they are very slight collapses, hardly noticeable with the naked eye.
However, if the damage is located within the system, it is possible that it
prevents the preparation and accessibility of the hard disk, which means that
in some cases a C1 can be irrecoverable.
Level 2 (C2)
A C2 scratch
is immediately visible, and, depending on the hard drive, may be unrecoverable.
Still, it is possible to create an image * of the hard drive even in the event
of severe damage.
* The
process of creating an image of the disk requires the collaboration of
experienced laboratory engineers who “create an image” of the hard disk sector
by sector. Engineers recreate the file structure of the operating system by
reconstructing the links to the file data and perform an extraction of the data
to an external storage drive.
Level 3 (C3)
When it
comes to data recovery, this is the end of the road. A fault level C3 means
that all the magnetic coating on the discs has been scratched away, which is to
say that the data no longer exists and the hard drive is therefore
irrecoverable.
What is the next step?
If you
suspect that your device has suffered physical damage, turn it off immediately
to avoid further damage to the drives that could lead to irreversible data
loss.
You can then
look for help from any software, which will help you in data recovery from your damaged
hard drive which is much better option than repairing your hard drive and
having a possibility of losing your data in saving your hard drive.
So to get a
help of software for saving your data which is much more important than your
drive.
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