What To Do When Disaster Happens

When you experience a data loss situation it is extremely important that you not act hastily to try to resolve the problem. Doing so can make matters worse and could result in the complete and permanent loss of your data. If you don't understand what is happening with your system, don't do anything but seek the advice of a hard drive data recovery professional.

If your drive is making any unusual noises such as clicking, grinding or metal scraping, turn it off immediately! This condition typically indicates a head crash and major media damage. Hard disks spin at a high rate of speed, anywhere from 3200 to 10,000 revolutions per minute. Extensive damage can occur in a short period of time if a drive is left running, making the data irretrievable. In this situation it is best to turn off the system.

If you've accidentally deleted files, emptied the Recycle Bin or Trash Can, don't install any software or save additional files to your drive. Doing so may permanently overwrite the deleted items. If you are in the middle of a project when you discover files are missing, or you believe they have been deleted, save the current project to a floppy disk, or another storage device. Don't write, install software, or save anything to the drive where the missing files were located. Although you probably won't need hard drive repair, you will want to be save as rather than sorry.

If you tempted to use commercial utility software such as Norton Utilities, and would like to attempt recovery on your own, you might render your data completely unrecoverable. We use high level recovery software costing thousands of dollars to recover data.

Getting Started

Call us for a no cost rough idea on hard drive recovery, turn around time and success estimate.

Inform us about the following:

1) What operating system you are running: Windows, DOS, Mac OS, Novell NetWare, or UNIX. If you are not sure, just tell us the model and make of your computer.

2) The physical capacity of your drive or other storage media that has failed. If you don't know we'll try to help you find out. The model number of the drive is also useful but not required. Hard drive recovery is even possible when the fat table has been damaged!

3) If the drive is using compression such as DriveSpace, DoubleSpace, Stacker or Times Two. These programs compress the directory and work differently than file level compression like Zip, DiskDoubler or StuffIt archives.

4) If you are using any password protection or encryption software. We will need to know what program you are using, the version and the password.

5) About the current problem, any particular symptoms or steps that led to the situation. The more we know about your particular situation, the easier hard drive recovery will be.

Recovery Completion Process

In the event that Gap-Computer is able to do a hard drive repair and retrieve your files, we offer several means of returning them to you. Depending on the size and amount of recovered files,, they may be placed on USB, DVD or CD. They may also be placed directly onto a replacement hard drive, provided by Gap-Computer, the customer, or a third party, such as the drive manufacturer or an extended warranty corporation.

*Remember to BACK-UP often. Don't take chances with important data! Hard drive recovery should not be your last resort!