• Never physically open up your drive. Exposure to unfiltered air, and the contaminants that it carries, can permanently ruin the platters.
• Treat your drive with care. Do not drop it or toss it around after you have removed it from your computer, as it is very delicate.
• Be especially careful with laptop drives. Although these drives are designed to be jostled and moved around, they are thinner and smaller than desktop drives. If their cases are bent or broken, it may become impossible to remount the drive.
• Do not format a disk unless you are absolutely sure that the drive works and contains no data that you want or need. Formatting will completely wipe the drive of all its contents.
• If you back up data to CDs or DVDs during the recovery process, check that the burning process was successful or you may lose the files forever when you reformat your drive.

It can be a very disheartening thing when a hard drive crashes out on you. Most of us have experienced that terrible morning when you switch on your computer and it refuses to boot up. It doesn’t matter how many times you try it, it just will not boot up. If you know a little about computers, you might try to go into CMOS to check the settings, but for most of us the only answer is to call in the hard drive recovery experts. Only a few years ago there was no such thing, but the rapid expansion of Information Technology has given rise to a number of hard drive recovery experts to fill this gap.

You can find hard drive recovery experts in most of the main centres. Intratec is the one we always use. They have offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and a recently opened branch in Durban. These hard drive recovery experts have all the latest equipment and make use of the very latest software available. Hard drives can crash for a number of reasons. There could be a physical failure of the read/write head.

The motor that drives the drive could have failed. There could be corruption of the data itself on the hard drive – this can easily occur when there has been a dip or a spike in the voltage, such as occurs during electrical storms or power outages. Or you could have accidentally kicked the computer while the heads were in motion. If you have a boot up problem, call the experts. Call Intratec.

The Internet or the World Wide Web as it’s sometimes called is nothing less than a vast collection of data that is stored in millions of hard drives all around the world. Today’s “Information Age” runs on data, so the storage of that data is very important, not necessarily just to the owner of that data source, but potentially to many people around the world. Imagine what would happen if Google crashed – well, it has in the past and it may well do so again, with disastrous results. People rely upon their data storage, but sometimes a hard drive fails, and then it’s time to call in recovery professionals. Hard drives can fail for all sorts of reasons. It could be a mechanical cause such as a head failure, it could be because of a thunderstorm, or it could be a malicious attack by a virus or other malware. Whatever the reason, there are recovery professionals out there to assist.

Not so long ago there was no such thing as hard drive recovery professionals, but the advance of Information Technology has necessitated that such a profession should have evolved. Today most major urban centres have at least one good hard drive recovery professional service.

One such organization is Intratec, who have bases in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. If and when you experience a hard drive failure, you could do far worse than contact this company. We had such a failure just a few weeks ago, and within 24 hours, they had us up and running again as though nothing had happened. It’s good to be able to call upon a company you can rely on.