Hardware Malfunction
bozz
Status: Guest
Reply Quote
If the computers hard drive crashes and cannot boot and then if during installing new OS the hard drive needs to be formatted, is there any possibility of retrieving the data?
Back to top
techAdmin
Status: Site Admin
Joined: 26 Sep 2003
Posts: 4124
Location: East Coast, West Coast? I know it's one of them.
Reply Quote
yes there is, IF you STOP doing anything with it, remove it from the system, and only let someone who knows how to try to extract the data handle it, and then only for the time required to do the operation.

Basically every minute the hard drive is powered up and on, is one less minute of life it has.

If the drive spins up then someone who knows what they are doing might be able to get the data off it.

It also will depend on if you did the quick or slow format option in the OS reinstall, the quick will have left a lot more data that's easily recoverable than the slow.

However, reformatting makes it a lot harder, and raises the cost substantially, and lowers the odds of success, so what you did there basically made it as hard as possible to recover your data as it can get, well, there's one more step, that's when the disk doesn't spin, and they open the disk up and actually read the data directly from the disks in a sealed lab.
Back to top
Display posts from previous:   

All times are GMT - 8 Hours