Chapter 17: Resurrecting a Dead Hard Drive

Overview

Somewhere, at some time (and it will be a bad time, trust me), a hard drive will fail on you. Statistically speaking, this is one of those hard computer lessons almost all of us experience at one time or another.

Why? Are the drives poorly made? Probably not, although hard drives today cost a fraction of what they used to cost; that price reduction must have some effect on production and quality control. Instead, I think the problems have more to do with the use and abuse these workhorses receive.

Did you know the platters inside your hard disk turn at the rate of 5400, 7200, 10,000, or even 15,000 revolutions per minute? Can you imagine the wearing effects of that speed? What about the amount of heat that’s produced in that tight little casing with that speed of operation?

A hard drive is critical to a successful system boot. And since we left the dark days of DOS, the hard drive is necessary to store and support the ever-bloating operating systems; they used to fit on a floppy disk but now they challenge a 2GB hard drive. You use hard drives as temporary workspace, as if they were computer memory, to move chunks of large files on and off your Windows desktop. You make them unhappy when you shut down your PC before data is properly written to them. You repeatedly restart your PCs, expecting the hard drives to work the first time and every time. Few other pieces of PC equipment have such demands placed on them, and only a few are as important to your PC’s operation.

Sure, some drive manufacturers have told you that you can expect storage on the recent hard drives to last up to 35 years. But you’re not likely to still have those drives, after all. You’ll probably throw away the hard drive with your PC when you replace it every 2–3 years. This means you’ll probably retire your hard drives long before they die.

Yet some hard drives will die on you in service. And even if you’ve been scrupulous about backing up your files, invariably, you’ll need something on that failed drive that you’ll try almost anything to retrieve—at least until you hear the price tag of professional data-recovery services.

This chapter is devoted to last-ditch efforts to resurrect what appears to be a dead drive, even if just to pull off any irreplaceable files.

With that said, however, you won’t always—maybe not even frequently—be successful in your recovery efforts. Users without the money to pay for professional recovery, usually consumers and small business people, may find that their lost data will stay lost. The easiest way to prevent the loss from occurring in the first place is to scrupulously copy your files to a second source (almost anything other than your primary hard drive) regularly, before such a disaster strikes.



PC Disaster and Recovery
PC Disaster and Recovery
ISBN: 078214182X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 140
Authors: Kate J. Chase

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net