Can you ever imagine, what would happen if the data that you had worked upon over several weeks have been lost? Ever wonder what would be the reasons for this mystery? The answer could be the failure of the hard drive.

Although the world is becoming highly digitised and the computing process has reached an advanced stage over the past twenty years, the risk of hard drive failures has not come down. There are less safe mechanisms to prevent the failure.

The hard drives are extremely susceptible to failure such as head crashes, circuit board shorts, electrostatic shocks, power surges, overheating, etc. Even power failure could damage the hard drive to a major extent. Power surges and sags damage hard drives and corrupt Windows systems, databases and other programs and services which need safer shutdown. Though you have expensive surge protectors, UPS, and backup generators, it cannot always help you. By taking backups, one could recover the lost data.

Not withstanding this, the backup media such as tape, DVD, CD, Zip or floppy is usually failure-prone. They are vulnerable to damage by the environmental conditions such as heat, sunlight, humidity, liquids and also dust. Even human mishandling such as scratching, bending and dropping the devices might cause damage to them. It is also a fact that it could be easily lost or stolen. The magnetic backup devices can be even damaged by electromagnetic fields emitted by TVs, monitors, speakers and other electronic devices.

In general, the failures in the hard drive can be broadly classified under four categories. They are firmware corruption, electronic failure, mechanical failure and finally the logical corruption. When a hard disk spins up when powered on, but not recognised by the computer, then it can be termed as firmware failure. Sometimes the computer will correctly recognise the spin up of the hard drive, but the system would hang du ring the boot process.

Hard disk firmware is the soft! ware cod e which controls and is also implanted in the hard drive (hardware). Corruption in the firmware will not allow the computer to interact with the hard disk. The data in the disk could be recovered if the repair in the drive is rectified and reprogrammed. Recovery requires small level of programming and manipulation of the hard drive. When a hard disk is not spinning up even after the drive is powered on, then it should be noted that it is dead and will not be recognised by the computer.

Normally, electronic failure causes problem on the controller board of the hard disk. When a computer suffers due to power fluctuations, it largely affects on the controller board on the hard disk.

Mechanical hard disk failure will be caused when an internal component goes wrong. If it becomes faulty, then the data in the hard disk will deny access. It can be diagnosed when a system is powered on; it will make a regular ticking or clicking sound. Data recovery in these cases req uires the drive to be worked on in a clean room. The drive has to be taken away and examined in the lab. The users should not be tempted to open a hard disk even if they are aware that it has mechanical fault. There are many possibilities of disturbing the recovery process which a recovery specialist alone could handle

Logical errors could cause simple to highly complicated problems. There might be an invalid entry in a file allocation table or the corruption and loss of the file system. Logical errors will not cause any physical damage to the disk; rather the information stored on it would get destroyed.

There are many data recovery companies in the market to help out the regular PC users to recover the lost data. Fields Data Recovery is one such company with a lot of credibility and reputation.

Engineers from Fields have gained 14 years of experience in the field of data recovery from all forms of digital media which encompasses physically damaged ha rd drives, corrupt smart media and inaccessible removable me! dia. It has been approved and well recognised by many leading hard drive manufacturers and other companies such as Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Samsung, Toshiba, Western Digital, Reuters, Department of Defence, Warner Brothers, Intel and many fortune 500 companies.

It offers free consultation round the clock through an emergency data lifeline and also offers a free instant price guide.

Though the company’s base is in the UK, it has spread its tentacles in France, US, Germany and Middle East. The mission of the company is to provide effective solutions to data loss at affordable prices, while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. The feedbacks provided by various customers stand testimony to its unique services.

For more information on Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk