Hard Drive Data Recovery FAQ
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What should you do if you are experiencing hard drive problems?
Top FAQs for Hard Drive Recovery
What should you do if you are experiencing Hard Drive problems?
Hard drives break, it’s a fact. Some will last for decades, some last for a few days. If you are concerned about the health of your hard drive, here are some critical steps that you can take to protect your data and give Gillware the best chance to recover your data.
My hard drive is clicking, beeping, or making grinding noises, what should I do?
These symptoms are likely to be damaged platters or physical fault with the drive. Power off the device immediately and contact Gillware Customer Support.
My hard drive has suffered environmental damage (fire, flood, or power surge, etc), what should I do?
Do not open the device or attempt to power it up. Any attempt to open the disk impacts the chances of successful data recovery. Contact Gillware Customer Support immediately.
My files are missing. What’s going on?
We recommend that you stop using the drive. Logical errors like this can be compounded by continued disk usage, and you may inadvertently overwrite your precious data.
How much does hard drive recovery cost?
There is no set fee for a hard disk recovery as every case is unique; however, feel free to pick up the phone to contact the team who will be able to give you an accurate estimated cost to recover your data. You can also check out our comments on costs here.
Why do hard drives fail?
There are many reasons why a hard disk might fail. Ask anyone in the data recovery industry! Our engineers have compiled this list of the most common failed hard drive symptoms that we see at the Gillware Lab. (Incidentally, Gillware can recover files from each of them.)
- Clicking hard disk drives
- Beeping hard drives
- Failed Head Stack
- Failed Drive motor
- Hard drives with scratched, dirty, or damaged disk platters
- Deleted data from hard drives
- Hard drives detecting the wrong capacity
- Failed SAN Storage Devices
- Failed CCTV Camera Hard Drives
- Formating issues
- Environmental Damage
- Physical Damage to your data storage devices
- Malware, viruses, or ransomware resulting in data inaccessibility
- System failure resulting in drive problems
- Inaccessible partitions due to hard drive damage or corruption
- Logical errors on the hard drive
- Bad blocks on the hard drive
- Accidental reformatting
What if I only need certain missing files recovered?
There is absolutely no problem with this request. Recovering files is what Gillware does best, and providing there is no permanent data loss caused by file corruption or damage to the file system, our Data Engineers should be able to target specific files. This approach will likely speed up the entire data recovery process and could even lower the average cost of the recovery.
Do you support Mac data recovery?
Absolutely. MacOS is a common operating system we support. We support and can recover files from all revisions of macOS, Windows, and Linux.
What hard drive data recovery software do you recommend?
Gillware does not value any other off-the-shelf data recovery software and recommends you avoid free data recovery software. The Gillware R&D team has created our own data recovery software called Hombre which can manage the entire data recovery process and is the only way we could get an application that does everything we need. We couldn’t find a good off-the-shelf product, so we designed our own from the ground up. There are no guarantees that any software can recover files and get your lost data back.
Have you recovered files from an External Hard Drive?
Absolutely. It doesn’t matter where data is stored, an internal or external hard drive makes no difference to Gillware.
