Process of saving your data from damaged, failed, corrupted or inaccessible primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally is known as DATA RECOVERY. Often, the process is used to recover your data from storage media devices, such as hard disk drive, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics.

However, the toughest of your data recovery processes is “recovering data from your crashed or damaged hard drive”. Hard Drive is a cardinal part of your computer; in fact, it’s virtually heart of your computer; it’s one of the most delicate parts of computer. It stores all your data in computer, and if it crashes, you virtually lose all your valuable data.

Beyond question, there has been great development in the computer technology over the past 20 years, but hard drives still crash. Actually, Hard Drive is comprised of spinning platters that spin at around 120 times per second (7200 rpm). These platters spinning at very high speed can get easily disturbed by even a small interference, which can easily damage the disk, and cause complete data loss. The best idea however is to always back up your data. But, accidents do happen sometimes! Your hard drive literally becomes functionless, when it crashes.

What, if any such accident happens with your hard drive? Your data is pretty safe and recoverable, if you have made routine backups of your important data. Still, it would be a great inconvenience to restore and install all the applications and data once more on hard drive. However, the worst happens, when you have not got any backups. You really are in trouble! Data Recovery, you know, is a quite expensive and time consuming process.

Sometimes, loosing all data, after a hard driver crash, you simply give up and buy a new hard drive, when the data could easily be recovered. Luckily, there are some data recovery procedures, which you can try before simply giving up. For instance, you must check, whether your hard drive has lost data completely or a single partition of hard drive has failed. Often, you partition your hard drive into several drives that appear on the computer. Sometimes a single partition fails or is inaccessible. That means that all is most likely not lost, and it could probably be recovered with a little hard work. Thus, you should try to find out the reasons of your hard drive failure. Hard drive may fail or crash due to two reasons – logical damage and physical damage.

Logical damage is primarily caused by power outages that prevent file system structures from being completely written to the storage medium, and problems with hardware (especially RAID controllers) and drivers. Logical damage certainly can cause drive crash and data loss. To repair logical damage, you need specialized boot disk, Live CD or Live USB containing a minimal operating system and a set of repair tools. There are various programs that can help you repair logical damage and correct inconsistencies due to the damage. Most operating systems come with at least a rudimentary repair tool for their native file systems; for instance, Linux comes with the fsck utility, Mac OS X has Disk Utility, and Microsoft Windows provides chkdsk. Some of the specialized software that you can use in data recovery from logically damaged hard drive include – The Coroner's Toolkit, The Sleuth Kit, TestDisk, ILook IXimager, DCFLdd, CHKDSK, and fsck.

But, what if all your data recovery efforts fail? Your data recovery efforts certainly fail, if hard drive has failed due to physical damage. Still, you need not get hyper-tense! You can simply call specialists or professionals, who can help recovering any data that might be left.

You certainly need the services of data recovery pros or specialists, if your hard drive has physical damage. You can’t repair physical damage at your home. It really requires highly professional expertise to repair most physical damages; for instance, opening a hard drive in a normal environment lets dust in, which settles on the surface and further damages the platters. Thus, it just complicates the data recovery process. Furthermore, you normally do not have the hardware or technical expertise required to repair such damages. Hence, you should consult data recovery companies, professionals, or experts to salvage your data. You can find numerous data recovery companies, or experts, offering professional data recovery services. You can also find data recovery services online.