Data Recovery Guide

At Rockingham I.T. Solutions we understand the consequences of data loss. They're not just data files, they can form your entire business and/or personal information. Information that may be irreplaceable.

We are situated in Rockingham, between Perth and Mandurah and have been sucessfully recovering Data for many years at a fraction of the normal cost.

Either drop off your hard drive at our workshop, strictly by appt only or by sending to us at our P.O. Box address details located on our Contact page.

Once we receive your hard drive, it will be logged into our system & queued for evaluation by one of our data recovery technicians which normally takes a few days depending on our work load.

A recovery diagnosis report will be produced and emailed to you which will tell you about the failure mode of the drive. Hard disk failure mode can be either Logical, where a drive is working, but the data is no longer accessible or electronic failure where one or more components have failed on the electronics board or logic board on the back of the hard drive. Another possibility is that the internal pre-amplifier circuitry located inside the disk has failed.

Another mode of failure is mechanical failure which means either the read/write heads or the motor have become faulty. This is normally associated with clicking or a grinding noise when you power up the hard drive. For a successful data recovery, faulty parts have to be replaced in a class 100 clean room using a donor hard disk. This will repair the hard disk temporarily and allows the data technicians to recover or extract as much data as possible. The report will contain the nature of the failure, cost of data recovery and an estimated completion date with various service options. 

Upon receiving your approval to proceed, your hard drive will be "cloned", to safeguard the integrity of your data as all recovery procedures are performed on an exact sector by sector duplicate of your original drive and queued for the actual data recovery procedures.

If your hard drive is repairable, and passes all the "hard drive fitness test" then we will return your data on your repaired drive. If it is determined that your drive cannot be repaired or the repair is temporary just for the sake of data recovery, we would then return your recovered data in a variety of ways, including copying it onto a new hard drive or writeable CD/DVDs. If you have brought your laptop or PC for data recovery, then we would replace the faulty hard drive, reload your Operating System and copy the recovered data back onto the computer's new hard drive. (Additional costs may apply in this case therefore we will seek your approval before doing so.)

The data on the image media would be tested for accessibility and integrity and that the critical files open within their respective programs, any further logical repairs are made if necessary.

We will keep a copy of your data for 31 days to ensure the successful your data has been received safely. After 31 days, your data will be automatically erased from our data recovery server at a level that will render all data irrecoverable unless you have opted for us to continue storing your data which is charged at $50 per week.

Defective Hard Disk Drive Heads: Commonly known as the 'Click of Death'. Your hard drive is on its way out, along with your data. When the drive initially powers up, a logical procedural check is initiated to ensure that the drive has gained the required level of speed before positioning the heads across the platters. If the drive does not reach a 'Ready' state, the logic is repeated for a set number of times causing a clicking sound, after which it stops trying. The hard disk drive will appear dead.

Do not run "software" recovery programs in this state. They cause Disk I/O read / writes, and
this exerts a lot of stress on the read/write heads, which in turn causes errors to be written onto the disk, further decreasing the chances of data recovery.