“Many thanks for getting my files back after my PC failed. During the week before my PC failed, the fans were very loud and it crashed randomly several times, until the operating system was not found when booting up one morning. I was meaning to write my files to DVD, but kept putting it off.”
Harry Smith, Huddersfield
A desktop midi tower computer was delivered to our laboratory in Oxford from Huddersfield contained a single 1TB Blue Western Digital hard disk drive. An inspection of the computer revealed that the fans and other components were covered with a large amount of dust. It was clear that the hard disk drive, even in normal conditions would have little no cooling. An inspection of the hard drive revealed it not to be suffering any visible physical damage. Our hardware data recovery specialists secured a sector-by-sector image copy of the drive, encountering approximately 8,000 unreadable bad sectors during the process. It is fortunate that the damage caused by an obvious case of overheating had only resulted in a rapid buildup of bad sectors, rather than other common problems, such a read/write head and spindle motor failures.
When the image of the drive was inspected it reveal a single 1TB NTFS Windows installation volume and recovery partition. The Windows volume contained approximately 420GB of recoverable files, which included the operating sytem and program files, along with mail, music and video files, office documents and a large number of photos. A file scan revealed most of the unreadable bad sectors to be affecting system and program files, with only a couple of video and music files damaged.
