From Our Data Recovery Engineers:
Choose a “DATA RECOVERY” Company very carefully. Sending your drive to an inexperienced company can only cause more damage. In fact this is a common cause of “data loss”. Check out the company you are considering very carefully. Ask if they are local and how long they have been in business. Will a technician or an engineer speak with you?
- Backup your data frequently.
- Do not remove the cover from the hard drive. This will only cause further damage.
- Do not attempt to recover data with commonly available software utility programs.
- Do not continue powering up a drive you believe has been damaged. It can and will only get worse.
- If you here a clunk, clunk sound when you power up the drive then the servo pattern has been lost and the drive can’t find track zero. Shut the drive down and do not power up again. You may break the TRK 00 Stop inside the drive.
- Never shake the hard disk drive.
- Don’t trying dropping the drive to get it “unstuck”.
- Don’t expose the drive to extreme temperatures.
- If a drive has been through a great deal of force or is visibly damaged do not try to power it up to see if you can see any data.
- Never power up a drive that may have been exposed to water, fire, lightening or smoke. The drive must be serviced or data recovered in an air-and static-controlled Class 100 clean room by data recovery professionals.
- Use the same type of precautions for any type of media including floppies, tapes, or CD’s when the data is valuable to you or your company.
- Package the drive properly when you send it in for data recovery. This is the second major cause of permanent loss of data. See our Shipping Info for details on how to package and send your drive to Advanced Data Recovery.
- Don’t assume that data is unrecoverable, no matter what it has been through.