Most hard disk failures are not "crashes" and do not involve irreparable hardware damage and so a hard disk data recovery is usually practicable.

Hard disks are remarkably reliable when you consider what is expected from them, but problems can and will occur. These can range from relatively minor damage to the drive electronics or a few bad sectors at a critical position within the data, through to problems with positioning the read heads or even corruption of the disk firmware and operating data.

Not all problems are with the disk drive. For the operating system to use data from the hard disk then it must be organised in a manner that the operating system can understand. In most instances this means there is a partition table that describes how the disk space is divided up, and each partition is used to store a file system that describes the organisation of the files within it. If the partition table or key sections of the file system information are damaged, then the files may no longer be accessible, even though the disk is working perfectly. The data recovery process from a hard disk with minor logical problems usually results in 95% of the data being recovered, the extensive damage to the file system will significantly reduce this.

At Altirium we appreciate the value of your data and the need to avoid taking risks with it. Every time a failing hard drive is powered on the likelihood of a catastrophic failure is increased. Connecting a failing disk to a system and running some disk data recovery software that causes the heads to thrash about trying to access data is an approach that will end in tears, so we don't.

We minimise the time required to work on the disk and, as quickly as is practicable, we take a copy of all available disk sectors, secure this copy, and perform the hard disk data recovery using this rather than the original disk.