Hard Drive Crashed? Learn what to do

Oh, that dreaded noise! “Whirr Whirr Wirrz Crzzzh Crzzzh Kerrkerker Verrrrrrrrr zaaa.” The sound of your hard drive crashing is almost enough to make you cry, but that is definitely not the thing to do. If you want to try and save your precious data, crying is not the best option. Your best solution will probably involve a certain helpful New Jersey computer repair technician who has lots of experience with data recovery. There are a lot of things that you should and shouldn’t do after a hard drive crash. Let’s start with what you shouldn’t. 

What You Should Not Do

There are many things that you should not do after a hard disk crash, but one of the most terrible things might just be the most tempting. The absolute worst thing you can do is take the hard drive out personally, and try to do electro surgery on it. Hard disks are immaculate to say the lease. The slightest speck of dust could completely ruin your hard drive. Hard disks are put together in a level-3 clean room, which is cleaner than your average New Jersey hospital. There is a 99% likelihood that you don’t possess the expertise, tools, or an immaculate work area to try to do it yourself.

The next bad thing that you can do is to try to clone the disk, or take a disk image. Theoretically you will have already made a backup copy of your current hard disk, so the fact that is crashed should be an inconvenience and not a catastrophe. If you don’t have a current backup of your hard drive, you are in a real bad spot. But, there is no reason to take it the next step and make it worse. If your drive spins down in a noisy debacle, it may not be the last time. It may have one or even two more resurrection power-ups, but those should not be used to troubleshoot.

The only time that it should be spin up is when is being done by a professional who has all the tools and settings prepared to withdraw the data off of it.

There is another important thing that people seem to forget. You should also, under any circumstances, ever give up. Even though a hard drive failure may seem like the end of the world — the last stop on the tracks — but it’s not the end. So, don’t give up; there is always hope. Just call up that guy from New Jersey, and see what he can do. Too many people decide that it is hopeless, and end up scrapping their hard drive just to get a few cool shaped magnets. You data is worth more than that. Keep your chin up and don’t give up. 

What You Should Do

One of the first things you should do is do some research. Don’t do research about how to resurrect a drive by yourself. Instead, research the hard drive you just had fail. See if it is a common thing. If multiple New Jersey hard disks from the same batch have failed, you might be eligible for a free replacement. Whether it is or not, at least you’ll know what might have cause the problem in the first place. This helps you know better how it should be fixed and help you know what you can watch out for in the future.

The second thing you’ll want to research is a new replacement hard drive. You’ll want to look up reviews on what company makes the best hard drives for your machine. Obviously, with the current one dead, you will need a new hard drive. There are a few things to consider when trying to find a replacement drive. The first, is compatibility; is the new drive compatible with your machine? The second, is space; do you want to keep the same amount, or increase the amount of space you have on your drive? The third thing to consider is speed; a solid state drive is significantly faster than a traditional New Jersey disk drive, and with no moving parts, it will not have any physical failures. After finding a drive to go into your machine, you might look up other external drives that you can use to back your data up on. If you end up with another drive failure, you will have a handy external drive with a back up.

The third thing you want to do is go to data recovery professionals and see how much of your data they can recover. If you already have your replacement drive, they might be able to take all the data from the old one, and put it on the new one, so that they can be swapped out, and back to normal.

Having a hard drive crash is very inconvenient, and may seem like the end of the world as you know it. Now you know what to do, and what not to do, if it happens to you.

by David Molnar

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