Laptop Repair - Data Recovery

Your worst Nightmare?

Several actions can cause loss of data. Shock, drop, corruption, virus and PC World Ltd to name but a few. Yes, that's right, I said PC World Ltd. Without doubt one of the most common causes of lost data. "Restore to Factory Settings" and would you know it, all your data is gone. All that for just £79.00.

Lets consider some facts here. Your instruction manual, your restore CD and 2 hours time will allow you to restore to factory settings without giving anyone £79.00. Yes, you will lose your data unless you have it properly backed up but at least you will be £79 better off.

Actually, first level format on a hard drive does NOT mean all your precious documents have been lost forever. We have a great chance of recovering them for you. It is not a guarantee and the process is quite time consuming but in most cases the effort is well worth it.

I quote from a letter we received recently:

"  Thank you, I wish we had found you before we went to PC World because it would have saved us so much trouble. As you know we were never told of the implications of restoring our laptop but because we bought it from PC World and it was under guarantee we just assumed that was the place to take it when it all went wrong"

This lady had all her digital photos on this hard drive, moments with her child that could never be recaptured and they were blatantly formatted without consideration  by the great PC superpower. Needless to say, if they were that important to her, she should have backed them up but as you know, hindsight is a horrible thing. The "engineer" ...haha....told this lady that her machine needed to be restored in order to see if it were a hardware fault when in fact it was a small corruption in the boot.ini file. Would have taken us half an hour to both diagnose and fix this without any loss. She went on to say,

" It was such a great feeling when you called to say that you had managed to recover the pictures and some other important letters we had. As you can imagine we have done as you suggested and bought a backup drive and in future we will be sure to back up all our stuff"

As mentioned earlier, there are other causes to data loss. In the section below we will examine these causes and give you the best option for recovery.

Shock

Most modern day laptops are bought for household use. Kids are often bought them for educational purposes and they are normally purchased from super stores like PC World, Dixons and Currys a supposedly hugely reduced prices. You know the offers I mean £299 (Save £150), free when you sign up to the latest broadband deal.

Well lets be honest here, what do you actually get for nothing? Don't need to answer it do I?

Modern day laptops are generally flimsy in build quality with laptop manufacturers relying heavily on after sales of component replacement and upgrades to make their money. With that in mind, it is fair to assume that dropping a laptop is likely to make the hard drive an extremely vulnerable component.

Recovering Data from such damaged Hard Drives is very difficult indeed. Without opening the hard drive to have it read on a multi reader, it is likely that your data will not be recovered. However, using a little known freezing technique, it may actually be possible to get 20 - 30 minutes life from an otherwise dead hard drive which would give us some time to get to data.

Truth is that prevention is the best advise we can offer. We could also recommend that you buy commercial grade laptops which are built for hard use markets such as sales teams and consultancies. Yes these will cost more but they will last longer and are certainly more durable.

Opening a hard drive needs to be done in clinical surroundings and the equipment needed to read this type of disk costs £1000's. There are only a few companies like Trend Micro that can provide such service and the cost is extortionate.

Virus and Spyware

Unlike many technicians, we don't believe this is an excuse to loose data. Even if a PC needs to be formatted, data can often be removed and backed up from behind the Operating System.

That said, spyware in particular is a damaging intrusion to your machine. Once again, prevention would be a far superior option. Be careful in your choice of protection. Over half the machines we see with spyware and viral infections are so called protected with the well known brands like Norton and McFee. These systems are intrusive, memory hogs, excessively complicated and in most cases don't work. what's worse is people actually pay a fortune for this privilege.

It is true that some spywares can cause sufficient damage to a registry that repair would take a lot longer than data recovery and format. It's a matter of deduction on your part and some questions about your laptop need to be answered.

1. Have you got all he program disks for the installed software

2. Have you got all your mail account details

3. Have you a VPN or C2C network on your machine

Here are some facts relating to the above questions.

Though not impossible, software recovery is quite a task. Most software installs to the operating systems registry and when you format a machine, that registry is lost. Other installation files like drivers are installed deep into the system folders of windows.

Mail account setting will be lost so it would be very handy if you have these settings stored elsewhere. Sometimes we can even recover Outlook and Outlook Express Address books and messages but there is no guarantee here.

VPNs and C2C networks require a lot of accurate settings to enable you to connect to remote workstations. Once again, information about software and it's relevant settings is important.