I once witnessed, in a provincial department of education office, a group of secretaries eating nyama and pap with their fingers during their lunch hour while sitting at their workstations. This kind of behaviour is horrific, but it probably happens in many offices across the country to some degree or other. If at all possible food and drink should be discouraged from being allowed at a computer workstation, or better still banned altogether. Keyboards attract food particles and cigarette ash, and a clumsily placed Coke can wring havoc. You would be surprised at how often we have to retrieve data because of this type of negligence.

If you hard disk does crash, the simplest thing to do is to go for your back ups. If the data you need is not backed up, you can try recovering it yourself. There is software available that can help recover your hard disk’s data and even make your hard disk usable again. Ties software tries to carry out a low-level read and access of your hard disk and is usually able to recover at least some of the data. Some software applications can recover deleted or corrupt data. They can also correct file system errors and logical errors on your hard drive. In the case of truly important data, such as company data etc., you may want to use the services of a data recovery expert such as Intratec We have both the expertise and equipment to handle a problem such as yours.

Hard disks crash for various reasons. One of the more predictable offenders is unstable power supply. When there is a sudden power outage or sudden power surge, hard disks can take quite a pounding. Aside from physically damaging the disk, logical errors to the disk’s file system can be traced to this reason. Logical errors for such happen when the disk suddenly loses power while it is writing critical information to the disk. Such errors can make the data on the disk unreadable unless the file system is corrected. Viruses and malicious code can also be a cause for a crash, as well as the ill handling of a disk – sudden shock, dropping, or magnetizing can seriously damage your hard disk.

Most hard disks show signs of croaking before completely crashing. Symptoms of an impending crash include frequent disk error messages, the disk not showing during start up, garbled information regarding the disk when analyzed, and weird clicking or whirring sounds. If you notice any of these back up at all costs! This ensures that you at least have your data safe before anything untoward happens to your hard disk. Some disks suddenly croak without a warning. You can, however, gauge and maintenance your hard disk by running a check disk utility to scan and repair logical errors. Bad sectors get marked too so data is no longer stored there.

IBM was the company that invented the hard drive more than fifty years ago, and their disks are normally reliable. However their DeskStar hard drives have an disturbing reputation for serious mechanical failure – the most notorious of which is known as the DeskStar “Click of Death”. This type of fault is identified by a regular scratching noise interrupted by a click sound that comes from the hard drive. Click of Death problems are among the most burdensome to recover data from, and we urgently recommend that you speak to one of our recovery technicians as soon as you suspect that your drive may be about to fail.

Fujitsu hard drives don’t often fail, but a few years ago they admitted to have released some five million hard drives that had a defective chip. When failure occurs for this or some other physical reason, recovery is possible and the time it takes will normally depend on the availability of spare parts. There are thousands of different hard drives on the market and it is not possible to stock spares for all of them. Logical data recovery occurs when there is nothing physically wrong with the hard drive but the data on it is either corrupted or a partition or sector is damaged. In such cases recovery is possible but can take a lot of painstaking work

Like other hard drives, Western Digital sometimes fail. An example of this type of malfunction could be because of the failure of the read/write head causing the drive to crash, or of an electrical spoke causing a burn out on a circuit board. Repair to this type of breakdown will depend on the availability of spare parts. Breakdown could also be logical – the drives S.M.A.R.T. system may have become corrupt causing the drive to fail, or it could be a track directory failure where the disk cannot recall the positioning of the data tracks and so is unable to access the data on the drive. In such a case we will try to repair the disk electronically.

Seagate hard drives can fail just as easily as any other, and recovery will depend on the nature of the failure. When there is a physical failure (this can be a broken part, a burned out motor or circuit board) repair will depend entirely on the time it takes to source a replacement for the damaged part. If we have the part in stock we’re looking at a week of longer. A logical Seagate hard drive recovery is a usually a little easier but can also be time consuming, as we may have to literally go through all of the data on the drive bit by bit.

Any hard drive can fail, Maxtor included, and when one does it can be put down to one of two reasons, and this can determine what type of hard drive recovery is carried out. You could be looking at a logical hard drive recovery, and this is carried out when there is no physical damage to the Maxtor hard drive. This will involve a scan of the hard drive and either electronic repair to the partition, which can be a relatively simple affair. Damaged or corrupt files will take longer as this involves a painstaking search of all of the Maxtor hard drive – the chances of recovery are good in most cases. If the drive is physically damaged repair may take longer simply because of sourcing the damaged part or circuit board. In such cases repair could take a week or longer.

Western Digital Corporation manufactures a large portion of the world’s hard drives and is a old hand in the electronics business, with a number of inventions to its name, that goes back nearly 30 years. Recently the company has broken ground in the data storage industry with a number of innovations. In 2001, a series of hard disk drives with an 8mb cache buffer were released at a time when most hard drives had only a maximum 2mb of buffer. Then, in 2003, they launched the world’s first 10,000rpm serial hard drive, The Raptor, a 36gb hard drive with an access time of less than 6ms – followed soon after by a quieter 74gb version. Like all other hard drives, Western Digital sometimes fail, typical reasons being
· Failure of the read/write head causes the drive to crash.
· The drives S.M.A.R.T. system becomes corrupt causing the drive to fail.
· Track directory failure – The disk cannot recall the positioning of the data tracks and is unable to access the data on the drive.
Western Digital drives have a tendency to sustain damage to the firmware zone creating a block to the data within, requiring expert attention for a safe recovery. Typically, when the system is booting up, it will hang for a few seconds while the BIOS tries to find the volume. Even though the hard disk may or may not be recognized correctly (if at all) the drive’s performance will slow dramatically before it fails altogether. Some Western Digital drives suffer from weak construction – especially the AB and EB series. Western Digital data recovery is just one of our fortes, and if you have a Western Digital hard drive that is giving you problems, don’t hesitate to call us.