Top 5 Boo Boos To Revive A Crashed Hard Disk

Desperation is no excuse to commit these grave mistakes when your hard disk crashes on you. Some may seem the logical action to take while others are ‘tried and tested’ methods recommended by someone who had the bad luck to fall in the same unfortunate predicament as yourself. On the contrary, your ‘life-saving’ techniques might actually make it harder for a professional to recover your data.
Here, we debunk the top five things that should never cross your mind when your hard disk crashes.

1) Tap it with a screw driver
While the trusty screwdriver might work for many things, this is just one situation where it just won’t fix your problem. Tapping your hard disk with a screw driver just doesn’t work – no matter how hard you tap.
Perhaps the only screwdriver you could use is the drink. Make yourself one to calm down your nerves and leave the job to the data recovery experts.
2) Drop it
Dropping it or hitting it against a surface is simply deplorable. If common sense is anything to go by, it’ll probably make things worse. Same for shaking it; you don’t want the parts in your hard disk to come loose. Insist on the drop it method, and the only thing that will be dropping is your jaw when computer forensic investigations show that your data is beyond recovery.
3) Freeze it
The freezer is the last place I would think of placing my hard disk; but apparently it does make some sense to do so. The logic is in having the low temperature contract the metal bits to have it work for that precious few minutes to backup the data in the hard disk before condensation takes place – which will probably make whatever salvageable data unsalvageable – forever. So best advice – don’t risk it.
4) Attempt to recreate a ‘clean room’ in your bathroom
I’m still perplexed by whoever came up with this grand idea. Shouldn’t the bathroom be the last place to consider as a clean room? Clean room and bathroom just doesn’t go down very well together.
After all, this isn’t a CSI-esque makeshift lab and most of us are not exactly Gil Grissom forensic investigation material. Yet, some insist on trying their hands (and luck) at fixing it by turning the heater to maximum temperature and letting water flow for a few minutes to fill the bathroom with steam, after which the air is believed to be clean enough for the hard disk to be safely opened.
However, what to do with the delicate parts of a damaged hard disk is another challenge altogether. In a class 100 clean room (an industry standard), special sophisticated equipment is used to handle the parts.
Therefore, chances are your replicate clean room won’t end up very much like the real thing. And you’ll have an added problem of condensation on your already damaged hard disk.
5) Run software recovery tools for physical damage
When it’s a physical damage, using data recovery software might actually aggravate the situation and rob any chances of recovery without opening the disk as such an automatic recovery might cause some circuits to break. Only if you can ascertain that it’s a logical problem, then you might salvage the loss with data recovery software.
So what can you do?
Now that you’ve read this, ignorance is no excuse either. When something like this goes wrong, the last thing you’d want to do is make it worse by tampering or meddling with it. If the data is valuable, leave it to the data recovery professionals who would know what to do.
Data recovery and insurance services in Singapore has only picked up in the last few years. In a recent feature by The Straits Times supplement Digital Life, two USB hard drives and another two external hard drives subjected to abuse in an experiment had its data completely recovered by Adroit Data Recovery Centre Singapore, the first data recovery centre with its own class 100 clean lab in Singapore.
Now that you know, should your hard disk ever crash, remember not to do anything silly that will end up costing you dearly. Consult a data recovery service equipped to handle the recovery. n