FAQ and Technical Articles

Can I recover my data using Norton or other disk utilities?

While most disk utilities provide an excellent preventative maintenance by fixing minor hard drive's problems, on the contrary they can render data unrecoverable in the event of extreme corruption.

But if your drive starts failing:

When you run any application on failing hard drive, including the software designed for data recovery purposes, you expose drive to extreme danger to ruin the magnetic layers on disks during extensive heads movement over the spinning platters.

Moreover, the same situation may occur even if you just leave you hard drive powered on (when computer is turned on and unattended). If you keep running your failing drive in the computer, the data can be devistated the same terrible way. That happens because disks inside the drive keep spinning at all time, even when you don't read anything from it. The computer is powered on, simultaneously, the hard drive is up and running: disks are spinning, and heads are flying over the surface. As soon as the surface has gotten even the minor scratch on the disk platter surface, the drive is undergoing under serious risk of ruining its data.

Before using a data recovery software you must make sure that...

Software recovery tools can be applied only to the fully functional hard drive in the working condition. This is obvious thing that it must be a mechanically and electrically functional hard on your hand before start using it in some computer to run any kind of software manipulations, including data recovery software utilities. Computer's BIOS/CMOS has to correctly identify the model of the drive, of course.

However, even if the drive is detected by computer, it is not nearly enough to say for sure that your drive is 100% functional. The drive is fully functional only if all sectors on the disks are readable. When the drive has problem with accessing the sectors (for instance: of one of the heads is damaged, or drive has a damaged surface, i.e. micro scratches), any attempts to use software data recovery tools lead to the further data damage, very often making data recovery impossible.

Before using any recovery utilities, be sure your drive is fully functional: mechanically and electrically.

If you suspect any of hardware problems:

• Do NOT run any repair utility as they can further aggravate the problem. The purpose of such utilities and what they are made for is to rectify the anomalies in the file system, but useless against other issues

• Do NOT let anybody, even your support engineer, a.k.a. IT support experimenting with the failed media.

• Do NOT keep working on the media.

If you hear any of strange noises (grinding or clicking) coming from your hard drive this can be an indication of a hardware/physical problem. Continuing to operate your system may damage your hard drive beyond repair and/or cause permanent data loss. Professional data recovery company is the only solution for such situation, do NOT delay and apply for its service while the data is still recoverable.
Start right now and right here, by placing data recovery order with us, our professional engineers with many years of extensive experience in data recovery are capable and will save your data, doing the job right from the beginning.