Following these guidelines when handling your hard drive will dramatically increase the likelihood of a successful data recovery. If you have any questions about proper drive handling please call one of our data recovery experts for assistance at 877-624-7206

These are real examples of the damage that can be done by not handling a hard drive carefully or by not shutting it down as soon as you hear an unusual noise.

Control boards can look identical from one drive to another, but looks can be deceiving. Placing a non-compatible control board on a drive can turn a simple non-invasive electrical recovery (Tier 1) into a much more complicated and expensive invasive cleanroom recovery (Tier 2), or render the data completely unrecoverable.

Opening a drive in an unclean enviroment not only increases the recovery cost, but it can render a drive unrecoverable, a hard drive's internal components are very sensitive to enviromental influences, Airbourne particulates, oils and moisture can accumulate on platter surfaces once the hard drive is opened making recovery of data very difficult and costly, if not impossible.

Drives that are clicking, screeching, or scraping have mechanical issues that must be repaired in a Class-100 cleanroom prior to recovering any data from the drive, There are no software tools available that will ever successfully recover data from a drive suffering from a mechanical failure. Running a drive that has failed mechanically for even a couple of minutes can lead to rotational platter scoring and can render a drive's data unrecoverable. If your drive if making an unusual noise please shut it off and give us a call at 877-624-7206 if you need advise on how to proceed.

The first rule in professional data recovery is to never alter, in any way, the data on the drive from which you are attempting to recover data from.

Placing a hard drive in a freezer and then powering it up can cause condensation that can short out the electronics or cause irrepairable platter damage. Hard drives are designed to operate within certain enviromental conditions. Extreme temperatures place the drive outside of its design specifications and can lead to rotational scoring.

Doing so can lead to irrepairable platter damage; making the hard drive completely unrecoverable. The caveman approach to data recovery never works.

Hard drives are complex mechanical devices that are very sensitive to physical manipulation. Rotating, flipping or repositioning a drive while it is running can lead to signifigant rotational scoring and render the drive unrecoverable.