Working with large quantities of information? You know the panic moment when you realize that you need some data that you deleted a long time ago. This is the subject of this article : Best ways to Western Digital hard drive data recovery. 1st lets start with some general data recovery tips, valid for all type of data devices, PC’s, Mac’s, phones.
Have a data recovery program ready for use. When your hard drive goes bad and you lose valuable files and documents, it’s time to turn on your favorite data recovery software solution and recover everything back from the bad hard drive. We highly recommended Disk Drill for Windows and Mac OS X. The main advantages of Disk Drill are its ease of use, support for more than 200 file formats and all common storage devices, including iOS and Android smartphone and tablets.
Most recovery apps start as a free trial, then will charge you if a scan indicates that it can likely recover your files. Sounds like extortion, but the idea is that we’d be even more mad if we paid for the service, then it told us that it couldn’t work. EaseUS and Recuva both come recommended, and we’ve tested and can vouch for Prosoft Data Rescue and Ontrack (see below). These apps scan the affected drives (or USB sticks, whatever) and let you search for whatever you’re missing by file type, name, etc. They’ll also show you recently deleted files, and tell you how recoverable they are. The process is as intuitive as any modern app, though the results are never guaranteed.
So, if your hard drive fails, you’ll need to take care to stop working on it immediately. Even if you’re not directly accessing the data on it, your computer is probably writing something to it thereby risking your shot at data recovery. Once the data is overwritten, there’s no any chance of getting it back. So shutdown the computer that is connected to the hard drive and unplug it.
Firmware: Your drive runs its own mini operating system in order to deal with all of the data and operations required to access it. Most of this firmware is stored on the platters. A small portion is stored on the PCB, which is required when the drive starts up. Firmware can go wrong, leading to inaccessibility of your data. Unfortunately hard drive firmware is not similar to your mobile phone or tablet—you cannot just update or reflash it. Each drive has its own unique modules and parameters and is highly complex in nature. Now that we understand the basic components of a hard drive let’s look at some common failures and symptoms you might experience, determine which component could be causing the problem, and see if we can tackle some of these problems DIY style.
Older laptops that were constructed with traditional hard drives were fairly simple to pop open and fix. You could unscrew a few screws holding the case together, and then plug into the drive via a universal SATA port to retrieve the data. Opening the actual drive itself is not without risk, or advisable, as dust could and will enter the drive, causing contamination and potentially additional damage during the process. For example, older drives would be subject to something called stiction, and sometimes became ‘stuck’, whereby the head and actuator were locked or stuck and the motor failed to spin, causing the hard drive platters to spin improperly. One trick that had some reported success involved placing a hard drive in the freezer, which would cause the metal to contract and become unstuck, at least long enough to offload the data.
If you have a storage device that you have not used for a while and you realize that you deleted information a long time ago, it is possible to recover it. There are different tools when recovering files, and one of them are data recovery software, programs specialized in the recovery of any type of file and that work under any operating system. Read more info on Recycle bin data recovery.