Media Damage

Overview

Media damage is caused due to the contact between the head and the surface of platters through the air bearing gap created due to the spinning of the drive. At that time, the surface is scratched by the head which destroys the important information that is required to run the drive and destroys the data.

The various kinds of damages that a storage media is susceptible to on account of media damage include the likes of reformatted hard disk, malicious data loss, power surge, applications that cannot be run, hard disk surface contamination, accidental data deletion, virus attack, operating system upgrade, corrupt file, clicking noises, and many more. The various types of storage media that are open to such an occurrence include IDE Hard Drive, RAID Drives, Fibre Channel Drives, SCSI drives, SSA, Sim Cards, Tape Drives, CD/DVDs, and many more.




Types of media damage

The two types of damages that can be caused to the storage media are physical damage and logical damage. The most common type of physical damage that can be caused to the hard disk is bad sectors. They are the early signs which indicate the deterioration of media over time. A bad sector is an area in which the data can neither be written to nor read. The best way to save the data is to copy it to another harddisk before trying to recover it. Software such as TestDisk helps in analyzing the sectors that have been copied from the hard disk to a good drive. What should be done in case of media damage?

In case your storage media gets damaged, turn off the power of the computer without properly switching it off with the help of Windows Shutdown utility. Do not perform any other functions on the media which may affect it even further. Do not let any one perform any experiments or use any tools to repair the damaged media. The task of data recovery is a specialized job and any further activity can increase the complexity of the damage. Always remember that the Scandisk utility should never be run as inappropriate use of such programs can complicate the task of data recovery.

Data can be recovered from hard drivers like SCSI hard drives, IDE drivers, SSA, IBM Microdrives and the like, as well as from tape devices such as DDS, DAT, SAIT, AIT, LTO, TLS, Travan and many more. Data can also be recovered from various other memory devices like Smart Memory, Sandisk, Secure Digital, Compact Flash memory cards, as well as from consumable media like CD, DVD, Data Cartridges, Floppy Drives, Zip drives, Iomega and the like.

How much time does it take? Depending on the extent of damage and the kind of storage device, there are usually three kinds of data recovery that most of the data recovery services providing companies offer. These include the standard, emergency and priority. The standard service takes up to 5 days or more, priority work reaches the engineers immediately. In case of emergency services, the engineers and data recovery experts work day in and day out to recovered the lost or damaged data.





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