Help With Data Loss
Here a two common lost data enquiries we get a lot, both of which have been submitted by customers. The first question is about retrieving files from a faulty laptop hard drive and the second discusses rescuing the files from a bricked Samsung Galaxy S5 phone.
1. Data Loss on a Laptop Hard Drive
“I upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and the system crashed a few weeks later.
I tried to revive the laptop myself initially through the command prompt function which regrettably did a factory restore on the laptop but i think i also created a new partition on the hard drive?
Local computer repair shop replaced the hard drive but I would like to recover the data on my old hard drive.
I have been to 2 different stores and they have given the same response, that they are unable to recover any data as it freezes at 28%.”
The problem you have is actually nothing to do with the Windows upgrade you performed. Instead your hard drive has bad sectors – areas of your hard disk that become unreadable. It’s a very common problem that usually goes unnoticed until it becomes so severe that files no longer open or the computer begins to freeze. The tell tale sign that identifies your hard drive as having bad sectors is the recovery attempts freeze at a certain point (in this case 28%).
This tell us that the first 27% of the hard drive is functioning normally, but at 28% the bad sectors start. These may be localised or may be spread across the rest of your hard drive. Bad sector problems are not repairable – it’s not possible to fix bad sectors, and hight street shops and software also will not help.
Recovering the data from a hard drive that has bad sectors can only be achieved by using a hardware approach and it is possible for us to recover all the data from drives with bad sectors using this technique. Find your nearest Data Clinic data recovery location or call us on 0800 151 2207 to arrange a free inspection and collection of your hard drive.
2. A Phone Recovery Question
“I have a Samsung galaxy s5. The screen is completely black and won’t work so we tried to use Dr. Fone to recover the data – in doing so the phone is now hard bricked. Is this something you can fix? Or would we need to get the screen fixed in order to do so thank you”
We see a number of enquiries where people have used software to attempt to retrieve data from damaged and unresponsive phones. What the software companies don’t tell you is that their software will only tackle specific problems and is quite unsuitable for many others. A dead screen is a common problem on Samsung Galaxy phones and the repair quite straightforward, the software has now made the problem more complicated to deal with. Read more about our general phone recovery services and specifically our Samsung phone recovery services.
What is Data Recovery ?
Data recovery is the process of retrieving information from broken, faulty and unresponsive digital storage media such as hard drives, mobile phones and computer tablets. For more details about common types of hard drive faults read our page on how hard drives fail.
