If you do try any of these, please understand that you do so against good advice and entirely at your own risk. If your data is important, we recommend you seek out professional data recovery services. Please contact us for more information about professional data recovery.
Data Recovery Myths You’ve Likely Heard
- Freezing your drive can fix it – There may have been a few guys who got lucky with this one and managed to free up a seized head stack by using this method, but you’re far more likely to cause damage than fix it.
- You should take the platters out and put them in another hard drive – Even with specialized tools and a clean room this has a very low success rate. At home your chance is absolutely zero. It’s a “Hail Mary” last resort effort even for professionals to attempt it. Hard drive platters must maintain perfect alignment or you are 100% guaranteed to lose all of your files.
- Lost files can always be recovered – I wish it were true, but it simply isn’t. Despite the claims of some advertising departments, there are many cases in which files are simply gone. Companies that advertise 90% or better recovery rate are lying to you. They keep their stats up by quoting exuberant prices for jobs they expect to fail, knowing the customer will back out, and they won’t have to chalk it up as a loss. For a drive that is clicking or spins up then back down your realistic chance of recovery is more like 60-70% (Not to scare you, but that’s reality). We don’t play those types of games. If your data is actually gone, we’ll be honest about the situation.
