We recently completed a successful data recovery on an HP 2.5” hard drive, taken from a laptop that had fallen several feet from a disk. Here’s how our hard drive data recovery team approached it.
We received a call at the beginning of the week regarding an HP laptop hard drive that contained important accounting documents for the client’s business. Unfortunately, he had not backed up his laptop in over a week, meaning all the work he had since done was lost. The laptop had fallen around three feet from a desk, while powered up, and the fall was severe enough that the screen had cracked and become unusable. The client tried connecting the hard drive to another machine using a USB SATA cable, but the drive wasn’t recognised, and there was a ticking noise coming from within the drive. As the data on the hard drive was the client’s entire business, it was important not only that the data recovery was successful, but that it was completed as soon as possible.
Upon arriving in our Cardiff office, the client’s hard drive was catalogued with a unique job reference number that followed it for the duration of its time with us. This ensured the client could get updates on the drive as and when he phoned. The drive was then passed on to our hard drive data recovery team in the lab, who set to work immediately. The hard drive was disassembled in our Class 100 Clean Room, ensuring no further damage was inflicted. Class 100 simply means that there are never more than 100 particles of dust per cubic foot – although in reality, there are way fewer. This mimics the conditions in which the hard drive would have been assembled in the first place. Our hard drive data recovery team found that the hard drive had suffered from a head crash due to one of the drive’s read/write heads becoming misaligned when the laptop fell. Because the read/write heads in a mechanical hard disk drive hover only nanometres above the spinning magnetic platters, it’s important not to subject your drive to any sudden knocks or bumps, or the heads could crash onto the platters.
Our hard drive data recovery team then replaced the damaged head with a recycled one, from our library of over 14,000 spare parts. We provided the client with a no-obligation quote, and a list of files that were recoverable. He accepted, and we transferred the data on to a blank external hard drive that he had supplied us with. Altogether, we recovered around 97% of the client’s data, and everything that was needed was safely returned to the client.
