Bad Seed Cider

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• Hard Drive Data Recovery
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• Data Recovery Services

A computer hard drive is a very delicate piece of equipment. A spinning disc of microscopic magnetized particles stores all the computer’s data files, operating system, directories, and programs. A reading head floats over the spinning disc close enough to read the magnetic charge of the surface layer in minute detail. When a computer is turned off or the hard drive spins down for power save mode, the reading head comes to rest on the disc itself in a specially designated area called a landing zone. This helps protect against the possibility of the head striking the disk when the computer is being physically moved.

The landing zone is not used for data storage, because any physical contact between the reading head and the disc (especially when the disk is spinning) will scrape the disk’s thin layer of magnetized particles from the disk substrate, destroying any data that was stored in the affected area and often causing the entire disc to become unreadable.

It is very important to keep the area around a computer as free from dust and other airborne particles as possible to improve the longevity of a computer hard drive. The reading head floats only about .07 millimeters above the surface of the spinning disc when in operation. At this distance, even a speck of dust on the surface of the disc can hit the reading head and scrape the disk surface.

Any jostling of the hard drive while it is in operation can likewise cause the head to hit the disk in a condition known as head crash. This will cause great damage to the disk because it is spinning at a speed of many thousands of revolutions per minute (RPM).

Although damage from dust or a head crash does not destroy all the data on the hard drive, it will often render the disk completely unreadable by ordinary means. Because the disk’s registry area contains the vital information about where everything on the disc is stored, even a small amount of damage to this vital region of the disk can render it useless. Furthermore, a head crash often causes physical damage that kicks up additional small particles from the disk surface that can then cause new and more extensive damage if an attempt is made to start the drive up again.

In these cases, data files can be recovered from the hard drive, but care must be taken to use a highly qualifies data recovery service. Some smaller, inexperienced computer repair shops will just try to spin the disk up and see what happens. If they get the data great, if not, oh well. Unfortunately, this method often not only fails to recover the remaining data, but causes further damage from the loose particles remaining inside the drive.

A good quality data recovery service will have an isolated clean room in which they will open the hard drive physically and clean any particles from the disk surface before attempting to extract the remaining data files from it. This eliminates any possibility of further damage to the remaining data and represents the best chance to recover important files, photos, and other information stored on the hard drive when it failed.