Hard Drives store most important data of a computer, including the system files. At times, due to various reasons, the drives fail. This causes serious issues as one may loose all the data on disk. A hard drive crash may cause terrible financial losses as well.

There are various methods to recover the data from a hard drive. The most common method is using the data recovery software. These can be used to recover the data from hard drives. Most of the software is simply read only and nondestructive.

This type of software usually begins by detecting the hard drive, analyzing and assessing the damage. Then they try to correct it and retrieve as much data as possible.

These software solutions are a bundle of utilities which help users in recovering data lost from a hard disk, like an accidental format, partition loss software malfunction, file or directory deletion or sabotage. There is data recovery software available for as low as $300 to $500. They are available on Internet freely and can be downloaded after paying using a credit card, in most cases. The data recovery utilities that are available for $30-$50 are nothing but rip offs and will only harm your hard drive instead of recovering and data for you. The choice of data recovery software depends on the operating system used. If one is using windows or Linux, the same utility may not work on both. In fact for Linux, separate utilities are available.

There are lots of data recovery companies that have customized utilities to retrieve data from the corrupted drives or deleted data. All these offer specialized services for recovering the data from various hard drives. Some may need a person to ship the drive to their labs. Yet some other companies also offer remote recovery process. The hard drive data recovery processes differ from drive to drive and from problem to problem. Before sending a hard drive to any lab for data recovery, one must decide whether the costs justify the real value of data. Hard drive data recovery process, in labs, involves identification of damage to disk, causes of damage and then the best approach for recovery. At times, it’s possible that entire data set may not be recovered. Common hard drives from which data can be recovered are:

• Standard IDE Hard Drives
• SCSI Disk Drives
• Portable Drives
• Removable Storage Devices
• Hotswap Drives
• Micro Drives
• Multi Disk Raid Arrays
• Pocket Drives
• External ATA & SATA Drives

Most common drive failures are:

• Hard drive clicking or making noises
• Hard disk head crash
• Primary hard disk error or not found error
• Invalid or corrupt FAT table
• Accidental file or folder deletion
• Non system disk error
• Computer unable to access hard drive
• Corrupt or damaged master boot record (MBR failure)
• Lost or deleted office documents, spreadsheets, emails, presentations
• Virus damage & password recovery
• Blue screen of death

The best possible solution to hard disk data damage is to back all data regularly. Other then that, there is almost no method, which can provide complete protection, against hard drive disk failure.

Jeffrey Meier
http://www.Jam727.com