ADRC Prompty Recovers Your Lost Data from the Laptop / Notebook

Emergency Hard Disk Rescue

If you have suffered data loss while using your desktop computer or notebook / laptop, there are a couple of things that you need to know in order to ensure that you are able to recover the lost data eventually.

Firstly, you need to determine the kind of failures. Generally, one could classify the failures to be logical or physical.

Typical examples of logical failures:

  • Inadvertent or intentional deletion
  • Wrongly format of disk
  • Attack by virus and malicious-ware
  • File system corruption
  • Use of Recovery CD resulting in partial overwriting
  • Windows operating system failed to boot
  • Loss of data due to some unknown reasons
  • Corrupted Microsoft office files, database or mail folders

In some cases, it is rather obvious to decide if it is a logical problem (such as deletion of data, virus attack etc). In more complex situation, one could follow a simple guide to determine the hard disk failure mode easily.

If one is unable to detect hard disk in the operating system or boot up BIOS (normally accompanying by strange clicking or grinding sound), this could be typical hard disk head crash. The cause could be due to power surge, impact or end-of-life wear and tear resulting in mechanical, electrical and material damage of hard disk.

In the case of logical failures, these are what you should know :
  1. One should never perform further write operation on the same hard disk partitions where the data was lost. This is to prevent overwriting of new data resulting in permanent loss of old data.
  2. You may read our simple DIY Data Rescue Guide to see if it solves some of your problems such as :
  3. If you are asked to perform a chkdsk, our advice is you probably should not proceed. If the file system corruption is severe, after chkdsk, you will usually end up with a lot of lost un-named files. Secondly, some large files (usually the email folders) may appear zero size.
  4. If you are unable to resolve the issues, you may want to submit the disk to us for recovery. See more details on the data recovery procedure.

If you suspect it is a physical failure such as read write head crash, the safest thing to do is to stop work immediately. Attempt to even power on the disk and worse still, run some commercial recovery utility will not get you anywhere, besides increasing the probability of damaging the data platter further. A hardware failure warrants a hardware fix and there is no second way about it.