When data becomes corrupt, it meas that the files, documents, or programs on your hard drive have been changed. This could have happened through the user accidentally changing operating system defaults, viruses or even the hard drive going bad over time and deleting and/or corrupting partitions and other operating hardware.
A drive that has sustained corruption will most likely need special tlc, which includes clean-room work. This is where the hard drive is carefully taken apart and examined in pristine, dust-free conditions. At that point, the clean-room technician will have to replace or repair parts of the internal hard drive to get it running in order to extract the data from it.
This is an instance that many people will take the hard drive to their local computer shop for repair, but computer shops are not trained in the logistics of clean-room work and we have talked to many clients who their computer shop informed them the hard drive was garbage. They then tossed the drive–and data–and sold the customer a new hard drive.
Make sure to get a second opinion. Data recovery companies specialize in getting data off of the hard drive and you should be able to send your drive into them for a free evaluation, which will let you know if the data is recoverable.
One more thing you should NOT do if your hard drive is suffering from corruption, is to attempt self recovery or repair. When the drive is corrupted, it will need to be taken apart manually. If you do not know what you are looking for to replace, you will most likely destroy fragile parts of the drive. Just the other day I was talking to a person who said their hard drive was having issues and he took the drive apart, but was wondering if he could get the data back still. I cringed, but asked if he used a clean-room to do this. His response was, “Well yeah, kind of…my bedroom.” No matter how clean your room or house is, there are dust particles that even the tiniest of them will get on the drive and scratch the platters, which causes the data to be unrecoverable.
The moral of this story: How important are those baby pictures or your businesses last ten years of Quickbook files? And make sure to get more than one opinion on getting your data recovered!
