After the previous incident I was very much curious to know about the Hard drive crash and its consequences so here is what I tried to gather some information on crashed hard drive recovery, it might helpful to understand hard drive data loss and its recovery possibilities.

Hard drive is the most popular storage media to store vital information or data. But if the hard drive gets corrupted or damaged, it leads to severe adversity.

Hard drive gets crashed due to several reasons, where it can be broadly classified into physical and logical failure. After hard drive gets crashed it doesn’t mean that you cannot recover data, still it is recoverable.

Symptoms when hard drive gets crashed

• Computer will not boot
• Shows error message like “No Fixed Disk Present” or “DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER”
• Blue or Black screen appears after power up
• Clicking/ticking/humming/crunching and grinding noise comes from the hard drive
• System often reboots, restarts hangs or freezes
• Shows “Drive not formatted” or “Operating system not found” messages”

When you face the above mentioned problems with your computer, first determine whether the problem is with hard drive physical structure/mechanical component or due to any logical failure.

Physical Failure

Need of physical data recovery arises, when there is a problem with the physical structure of the hard drive. Head crash, broken spindles, damaged platters that constitute the physical crashes of a hard drive. The most common symptom of hard drive physical failure is the ticking or scratching noise coming from the drive. Hard drive is very susceptible to dust, heat, fire, temperature fluctuations and mishandling. When you hear any clicking or ticking sound, suddenly shut down the system or else the condition will become worse, further causing permanent data loss.

Logical Failure

When your drive is healthy and is recognized by the system BIOS, but still is inaccessible is likely to be experiencing a logical failure. The causes for logical failure are human error, virus attack, software malfunction, sabotage etc.

Data lost from hard drive due to any of the above mentioned physical or logical reasons may be recovered by using recovery software.

What to do in case of hard drive crash?

• Immediately stop working on the drive
• Do not run any repair utility
• Do not try and save or reinstall anything on the hard drive
• Remove hard drive from the system and connect it to any of the healthy system as a secondary drive