Printer friendly version

Performing a do-it-yourself recovery? SMART technology can save you time and money

     In over 10 years of experience, we have seen a vast many cases when people have tried to recover their own data by using both Windows’ utilities and third-party software. Little do they know that using these tools in the wrong time can cause permanent data loss. The scenario is well-known: the person’s hard drive starts acting funny; they reboot and the “CheckDisk” utility tells them that it needs to examine the hard disk for errors. The user unknowingly accepts this, thinking that Windows is trying to help him or her. In reality, however, the CheckDisk utility is only designed to fix file system errors; in all other circumstances, it will cause further damage to the drive, and may lead to total, irrecoverable data loss. Scandisk leads to the same problems, as do third party software suites such as Norton Disk Warrior.
     The inevitable question arises: why would these programs, designed to fix my hard drive, actually make things worse? The answer is simple. The CheckDisk utility as well as ScanDisk, as mentioned above, are both designed to only fix file system errors and not any other types of errors. They fix file system errors by scanning your entire drive bit by bit, attempting to reconstruct the missing pieces. While this sometimes works for these types of errors, it also forces the head (the part that reads and writes your data) to work very hard. So if your hard drive suffered from a hardware problem or sector damage, forcing it to access information at extremely high speeds will inevitably cause a hardware failure, making the drive much more difficult, if not impossible to recover.
     As an example, we recently received a drive from a customer who had let CheckDisk attempt to fix his drive. The utility ran for nearly an hour and caused severe logical and physical damage, leaving the drive in nearly irrecoverable condition. Luckily, our technicians were able to recover the data; however all of the recovered files had lost their indexing information and were lumped together into one folder. Unfortunately for this client, his data consisted of over 15,000 pictures, so recovering the drive was only the beginning of his troubles. This example simply illustrates that running software such as CheckDisk and Scandisk can cause severe further damage to your hard drive. Third-party software such as Norton’s Disk Warrior is not much different – it is designed to fix only software-related issues and puts great strain on your hard drive, often causing a hardware failure.
     Hope is not lost, however, for those who want to try recovering their drive themselves. What the majority of home computer users don’t know is that all modern hard drives are equipped with Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART), a set of hardware monitors built in that allows the user to monitor the health of their hard drive. SMART uses a number of comprehensive attributes, such as read/write speed, spin up times and others to diagnose your drive. Most SMART software will automatically inform you of impending problems, well before they happen. This means that if you decide to try data recovery software yourself, your SMART application will help you determine if it is safe or if doing so will cause more damage. The catch is that the user must have a SMART monitoring program installed on their computer in order to read the SMART indicators. While Macs have this software built into the operating system, Windows users must find their own programs to use SMART on their computer (for directions on how to use Apple’s SMART utility in OSX, check out our article on maximizing the life of your Mac hard drive).
    At ADR, not only are we dedicated to recovering your data, we also strive to help you prevent losing your data again. This is why we’ve decided to dedicate a part of this issue to reviewing two programs that we find to be especially helpful: ActiveSMART and DiskView. While these utilities are both fantastic for simple monitoring of the SMART indicators in your hard drive, each offers its own unique features. We highly recommend that you take the time to check out our reviews of both DiskView and ActiveSMART.

Alex Bezborodov
Technical Writer
Accurate Data Recovery