Damaged Disk Data Recovery Safe Practice

While it is true that the checking error process, the attempts to fix them, and the bad sector reallocation process are the procedures to fix a damage drive but they are actually the last steps in data recovery procedure. Sure that directly fixing a driver is faster and have a high probability of success but if you value your data, you should that there is also a low probability that the fixing process can further damage the drive and may result in your data permanently unretrieveable. Therefore, the safe practice procedure in handling the damaged driver is to secure the recoverabiltiy of your data.

Lessons Learned

I wrote this with experience where two events taught me this lesson:

1. I had a shaky universal serial bus (USB) port and 4 terrabyte (TB) USB external hard drive with just the slightest touch could unsafely disconnect the external hard drive. I kept ignoring this and many times in a month, I watched videos for my external hard drive and often the video stops due to disconnection of me accidently touch the cable because of getting snacks and othe stuffs. Finally, there was a point when my external hard drive’s contents were unreadable on Windows but still readable on Linux. The mistake that I did after this was performing check error, fix attempt, and reallocating bad sector on Windows instead of reading the data on Linux and backup. The result is that the bad sector reallocation failed due to not enough space on the external hard drive and made the data also unreadable on Linux. This is the experience that gave me wisdom to write this damaged drive data recovery safe practice guide.
2. My other experience was actually before the above experience that taught me to not be hasty with the damaged drives which is better to wait for hours when it is stuck. This happens when I borrowws my 2 terrabyte (TB) USB external hard drive to a friend and it did not showed up on his Windows. Instead of being patient or at least shutting down the laptop, we plugged in and plugged out multiple times. Finally, the result was most of my data are unrecoverable. Maybe I would have saved the data if I tried cloning it…