The Hard Disk Crashed! What Happened Exactly? Can Data be Recovered?

We have all heard of cases, and unfortunately many of us had to live through one as well; a hard disk crash on a computer. It’s your worst nightmare. Even though disks are remarkably reliable, any electro-mechanical device will eventually suffer from the demand placed upon it and go wrong. We are used to hearing the term ‘crash’, but where does it comes from and is there any chance on recovering your data?

A hard disk crash is normally the term given for the failure in which the read/write head touches the surface of the platter. The hard disk consists of a platter on which the data is stored. This is rotating with a reading head floating a microscopic distance above the platter. Imagine what happens when this head ‘crashes’ down on the platter. Nearly always there is damage to the head and the coating of the platter will be stripped away. This is what happens when your ‘hard disk crashes’. However, there are many more hard disk failures that are commonly given the name ‘hard disk crash’.

Alignment Failure and Head Failure.
The read head of the hard disk is positioned at such a microscopically precise position in order to read the data. If any head suffers positional problems as the result of mechanical wear, it will no longer be able to read the magnetic signals. The disk will fail, but as long as the platter is not damaged, it is very likely that a specialist can recover the data for you.

Media Failure.
All hard disks suffer failures during writing at some time. Normally this is not a problem. Modern disks use ‘spare sectors’, which are used as a substitute when a failure occurs in a certain sector during writing. The disk will map out the ‘bad sector’ and use the ‘spare sector’ in its place. You will not notice anything at all as a user. However, after the number of failed sectors on the disk grows and the number of spare sectors decreases, you will start to see error messages being reported . Chances are that ‘bad sectors’ will appear in the most used parts of the disk and result in problems with accessing the file system. Even though the files are there, you no longer can access the data. The chances of data recovery are actually quite high, if the work is done by professionals.

Bearing Seizure.
Within the hard disk is a set of bearings that help the platter rotate smoothly at 10,000 rpm. A first sign of bearing failure can be that the disk becomes noisy. With a complete failure, the disk will stop rotating and will no longer operate.

Memory Failure.
When a disk is turned on, it will first load vital operational data into on-board memory. Any failure of the on-board memory devices can result in a disk failure, while your data might still be fully recoverable.

Data Failures.
These kinds of failures are often wrongly blamed on the disk, but usually due to some failure of the computer system or operating system. Information has become corrupted and sections of the file system can no longer be accessed.

Data recovery specialists are often able to recover data from disks that have suffered any of the above failures and success rates are very high. However, it can be very complex work in which case the costs might be quite high. In severe cases some data is lost forever, do not expect the specialist to be successful with data recovery from a surface that has been stripped by a real head crash. It is vital to have adequate backups, because failures do and will happen. Every a hard disk will eventually age and show signs of mechanical wear. Windows XP comes with a backup utility and a wizard that makes the whole process easy, Linux also provides a range or backup applications.

It has been said that there are two types of disks, a failed one and one that has not failed yet. So, do not forget to backup regularly to have the most current data safely stored away.

My PC Has Adware, What Should I Do?

We don't use E-gold very often since most of our online business and customer sales are conducted through our online merchant account. However, we occasionally have someone who will request paying by E-gold so we keep an account there for this reason. Once a month or so we withdraw the funds and decided to do so yesterday. Imagine our dismay when we logged into our E-gold account yesterday and found our balance to be a big fat ZERO! We had checked the balance just a few days ago so we knew this was not correct. After investigating the history of the account, we found that a spend had been made to another e-gold account user WITHOUT our knowledge or authorization. We had been hacked! Since we have up to date anti-virus and firewall software on our computer, we assumed we were safe. Not so! It seems this is not enough to keep away the hackers as the software does not prevent "Spyware" from being installed on your computer. "Spyware" is software that gets onto your computer and literally "spies" on your activities. The spying can range from relatively harmless use of cookies tracking you across multiple websites... to extremely dangerous "keystroke loggers" which record passwords, credit cards, and other personal data. That data then gets relayed to the person who put the software on your computer. Spyware gets on your computer in one of several different ways. First, it rides along with software you download from the 'Net and install on your system. Second, they come as email attachments (much like viruses) and automatically install themselves on your computer when you open the email message. Third, hackers find an open port on your computer and use the "back door" to install basically anything they want. And fourth, the more malicious types, like keystroke loggers, can even get installed by someone with direct physical access to your computer such as an employer, suspicious spouse, business competitor, or someone who wants to know exactly what you're doing. So how do you protect yourself against these malicious hackers? You need a program that specifically scans your system for the tens-of-thousands of existing spyware programs along with the new ones appearing daily. Below are two programs which specifically check for and remove spyware from your system:

"Spybot Search & Destroy"

www.safer-networking.org

"Ad Aware"

www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/

You may have spyware lurking on your computer right now so protect yourself today by downloading one of the above programs! As a point of reference, we contacted E-gold and informed them that we had been hacked. We provided them with the account number of the person who received the funds and asked for a contact e-mail address on the person. E-gold informed us that they could not provide that information without a "court order" and that basically there was no way of getting the money back! Take action today to protect yourself from this growing threat! The bottom line is:

Keep your anti-virus program current.

Install a firewall

Carefully screen software before installing it

Scan specifically for spyware weekly

Stay current on this growing threat.

An overview of continuous data protection

IT organizations have been caught between a rock and a hard place. Charged with protecting their company's information, IT organizations have established aggressive service level agreements (SLAs) that impact the manner in which they implement data protection by setting recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

Organizations struggle with shrinking or non-existent backup windows, the need to recover quickly, often to a specific point in time, and even meeting compliance or regulatory guidelines. Backing up to tape is no longer adequate; not only is it difficult to administer for backups and recoveries, but it lacks the speed, reliability, flexibility and simplicity IT needs to meet stringent SLAs. Backing up to disk using virtual tape emulation or virtual tape libraries also falls short as the administration of the solution is tape-centric and schedule driven. Add in the explosion of data, along with the challenge of protecting remote offices, and you have the challenge facing many of today's business--with IT sitting on the front lines of aligning business needs with today's technology.

As a result, a growing number of IT organizations are augmenting their traditional backup and recovery strategies with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. CDP dramatically improves RPOs and RTOs while eliminating backup windows. What's more, CDP not only reduces the need for tape in the backup and recovery process but it also makes recovery easy enough that users can often recover their own files, without help from IT.