One of the most complex tasks is hard drive data recovery. You realise its value only when your system crashes, and you want to retrieve data that has been painstakingly stored over the years.

Most often you are not able to recover data because you have not taken back ups or stored the data in a scientific manner. You must remember that the hard drive comprises of several magnetic disks spinning at phenomenal speeds. Even the smallest interference can cause damage to these disks, and lead to data loss.

That is why it is always advisable to partition your hard drive into several smaller drives such as drive C, drive D, drive E etc. The advantage of such planning is two-fold. One, you can store and retrieve information from these drives more efficiently; and two, some of these drives may survive damage in case the hard drive fails. You can then at least retrieve part of your data.

You should follow this method of disk partitioning even if you are told that drive failures are coming down today on account of smart technology that allows the computer to self-analyse and self-correct most problems. Data losses can happen for a variety of reasons. Some of the common reasons are: power failure, disk crash, software crash or virus in your computer.

Another point to remember is that prevention is always better than cure. You must take back ups of important documents, especially if you hear sounds such as rattling and scratching emerging from inside the computer. This basically means that your drive is about to crash. Also, you should store these back ups at different geographical locations. This way you will always have an extra copy kept safely.

You should also install the CHKDSK programme in your computer. This program will find and fix most basic Master Boot Record problems (MBR), provided it is run directly from a boot disk. MBR tells your computer how data is organized inside on the disk and also which partition to boot from. If one of your secondary hard drives has failed you can still boot directly in to Windows XP. Just run “CHKDSK /F” from the run command.

Usually Windows will automatically attempt to correct such problems without having to run this manually. However, sometimes windows will fail and so will you. At times like these it is best to reach for the yellow pages and call in an expert. Never attempt to fix hard drive problems yourself. You may end up losing more data.

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