Most of us wonder what do the people in data recovery labs do to recover data from your drive. If you see data recovery as a process, it does not involve any planned actions, as it is always a reaction based on the cause for data loss.

Let us categorize it in two major categories

a) Physical Crash – where drive is not getting detected by the BIOS of your PC and the drive has either electronic, mechanical failure or some kind of damage such as accidentally dropping the drive, fire, flood or any other external cause.

Recovery from such cases involves an attempt from an experienced recovery professional to make drive working by any means. If drive has electronic failure, the engineer would try to look for similar electronic board in the inventory to make drive working. If the cause is mechanical which is mainly head making clicking sound, is broken or is jammed are repaired by opening it in a class 100 environment and it is not necessary that it has to be a clean room and it is impractical to have a clean room for such small device.

I have heard of many tricks people try to make drive working in such cases, for e.g. dropping drive from a small height on a soft surface to ease any jam. Freezing the drive if drive has quick heating problems, let me tell you these attempts are extremely dangerous and can make the drive permanently damaged.

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