Rescuing a Damaged Hard Drive

Of all the hardware and devices that communicate together in a system called as your computer, the hard drive is primarily the brain (if your talking about your documents and data) otherwise its the CPU. But back to your hard drive. Also, of all your hardware installed, hard drives are painstakingly the most vulnerable--physically.

A hard drive is practically a disc that has several sectors, electronic switches, and tiny parts that move quickly each time you run it. In simple terms, when it's already so breakable, you can easily break it more when you try to run a damaged hard drive.

Symptoms that Your Hard Drive isn't in Good Condition

The most basic way to know is to pay attention on the sound it makes as you start your computer. With a damaged drive you are most likely to hear clicking sounds. What basically happens internally is, your hard drive tries to read data even if it can't so it creates that ticking/clicking sound as it tries to read over and over.

Sometimes, if the problem occurred simply as an error, the DOS (Disk Operating System) will report it, during the boot process, and you may be asked several options to diagnose, check and fix the broken sectors of your hard drives. In a physical damage however, it will try to read nonetheless.

At some point that drive is gonna be able to read the data, and load it to memory, and it will be as if nothing went wrong. In some cases that only one part of the disk is damaged, it will only have difficulties reading that part, and will ease up on the others. But knowing that something went wrong in the first place, you are risking your entire drive by continuing to run it.

For the ordinary user, hardware fixes isn't really something that can be thought and learned easily, so as far as physically damaged hard drives, calling a technician can't be helped.

Just a word of advice. If you happen to note that you are having such problem, and the most part still works, like loading the operating system and accessing your files, immediately backup all important documents into an external storage device in case something happens, cause you know something will.

If you did, you save yourself the trouble of spending large amounts in trying to recover your files.

After saving a backup, you're only option is to bring your hard-drive to repair, or otherwise it'll just break eventually.

If, in case, that your hard drive collapsed without getting your files backed up, you could try at least recovery software. But don't expect for much of anything, since the chance you actually get to recover something depends on the extent of the damage.

Lastly, I suggest that you only consider expensive recovery services for the very important files. In the end however, it is up to you to decide on your own files. The best practice is to always try to prevent these things to happen to you and be in the know.