Hard Drive Failure and Data Recovery Service

First, and most important: if you suspect mechanical or electronic failure in your hard drive itself LEAVE IT ALONE.

This means turn off the computer, disconnect the power.
Evidence of mechanical failure can include strange noises, clicking or grinding sounds, spinning or whirring sounds that your drive does not usually make.

Data can usually be recovered, even from a mechanically damaged drive. But you will need one of your local data recovery companies to service it.

About Hard Drives
Modern drives have a sealed section with mechanical tolerances of only a few microns. If they need to be opened it has to be done in a 'clean room'. 'Clean' here means a closely controlled environment free of dust and moisture, more controlled than a surgical operating theatre.
The sooner you leave a damaged drive alone the more chance there is that your data recovery specialist can save a good proportion of your files.


Causes of hard drive failure.
The kind of failures we are worried about here are mechanical or electronic. Mechanical damage could include damage from liquid or fire. But apart from disasters like that, shock or impact is a major enemy to hard drives. (So try not to drop your computer at all.)
If your hard drive has experienced a spillage, e.g. water (or coffee) damage, contact your data recovery expert as soon as possible for advice. It may be that, if your drive is wet, it is best to keep it wet until it can be serviced.

Inside the hard drive it is a bit like a record turntable: data is on a platter, the disk, and there is an arm with a reading head to read and write to the disk.
However, unlike a vinyl record, which is in contact with the needle when it is played, a platter in a hard drive must never be touched by any hand or implement or substance (like coffee).

Electronic problems

Problems with the electronics of a hard drive could be caused by your electricity supply (e.g. if there are spikes or if the power supply unit in your computer is faulty) or faulty components in the hard drive itself.

In either case it is best to leave a faulty drive alone. That is, don't keep trying to make it work. There are parts of the drive platter that hold important information about the rest of the data on the drive. The sooner you turn off a damaged drive the better chance you have that this information is intact.

Data Recovery Prices

Service from a data recovery company is usually not cheap.
These days data recovery specialists often operate a forensic service too, so they have an expensive laboratory to run involving specialist staff and a clean room.

Very likely they also want to operate a standards-compliant service: so they need to do the regular paperwork to satisfy local standards agencies. They need their facilities audited and accredited.
Fortunately, due to the nature of the business, they normally do not charge customers unless they can actually retrieve the data. No result, no charge.
There may be a small fee for inspecting your hard drive, but usually these companies only charge a 'full' fee if they can actually return your data to you.

But specialist hard drive recovery work is very expensive compared to the cost of the alternative, that is back-ups.

I don't know what the prices are all around the world, but here are some comparisons that are probably true everywhere.

Where I live it would cost about $900 to $3000 for a data recovery service. Most jobs cost about $900, and $3000 would be for a serious case of damage.

Where I live, I can get a brand new big hard dive for about $160.

So for $900 I could get three or four or more brand new hard drives to back up my data. It would be cheaper than getting a damaged drive fixed.

For less than $900 I could get a whole spare computer and back up my important data onto it. Then if anything happened to my main computer (i.e. not just hard drive problems but anything else as well) I could carry on working on the spare one.

I saw a company advertising on the web for their remote data storage service. That is, they regularly back up all your data onto their servers. They were in the UK. It looked quite expensive at about $100 of my dollars a year for the service.

But looking at it another way, I could back up my data off-shore for nine years before it began to cost as much as emergency data recovery.

Hard Drive Not Found?
If your computer fails to boot and/or gives you a message at boot time that no drive or boot device can be found, this could also be evidence of damage to the drive itself.
There is a minor diagnostic issue in this case: the fault may be either with the drive or with your motherboard.
This is relatively easy to check. If you feel comfortable with installing and un-installing hard disks in different computers you can try putting a known good drive into the computer to check whether the motherboard and its disk controller can use it and are working properly.
You can also put the suspect drive into a computer that you know to be working well and see whether that computer can detect and use the drive.
But don't do this if you already strongly suspect you have a damaged hard drive. If it really is damaged you risk making it worse if you keep trying it out.
If your known good computer cannot operate the suspect hard drive then you are back to the first piece of advice: since the drive may be damaged - leave it alone now. Time to look for a local data recovery company.

This could also be a good time to make a note of what files were on your drive. The disk recovery service will probably ask what was on the drive and what data you need recovered.


About deleted files on your hard drive:

If you have accidentally deleted some files and you want them back, this is also a data recovery problem. But this is not so serious as something like a hard drive crash.
If you have deleted some files by accident you may have merely sent them to the 'Recycle Bin' or 'Trash'. In that case just open the Recycle Bin folder and restore the files (in Windows, right click and select 'Restore').
If a lot of time has passed (like days, weeks or months) since you deleted the files they may no longer exist in the recycle bin. It depends on how much disk space has been allocated for the recycle bin and how full it is.

If you have deleted files in a way that does not use the recycle bin.

Some programs that make and delete files do not use the recycle bin.

In this case deleted files may still be recoverable. A file that has been deleted has not been instantly destroyed. Instead the space that it occupies on the hard disk is marked as now being free space that is available for use. But the space will not be used immediately and as long as it remains unused the file can be recovered with some 'undeleting' software.

There are many undeleting programs available and some are free or at least free to try, which may be all you need. Just search on the web for 'undelete' and you are sure to find something.

You will want to cause as little disk activity as possible until you can run your undeleting software. Otherwise you system might start using some of that newly available disk space where your lost files are sitting. So do not run any large applications or save any more files.

Of course it would be a good idea to install an undeleting utility before you actually need it.

And even better: have an easy way to make sure all your data is backed up and can be recovered at any time.