A specialized disk-imaging procedure is used to recover every readable bit from the surface. Hardware- and software-based recovery of damaged service hardware replacement on a physically damaged drive which allows for extraction of data to a new drive. Typically, the contents of deleted files are not removed immediately from the physical drive; instead, references to them in the directory structure are removed, and thereafter space the deleted data occupy is made available for later data overwriting. This alone may make the disk usable, but there may still be logical damage. Usually contains drive's firmware and adaptive data that helps the drive operate within normal parameters. Furthermore, end users generally do not have the hardware or technical expertise required to make these repairs.
The replacement board may need to be reprogrammed. Some manufacturers store this information on a serial chip, which can be removed and transferred to the replacement board. Each hard disk drive has what is called a system area or service area; this portion of the drive, which is not directly accessible to the end user.The re-installation can be done by downloading the operating system or by using a "restore disk" provided by the computer manufacturer. Recovery experts do not always need to have physical access to the damaged hardware. When the lost data can be recovered by software techniques. The process is essentially no different from what the end user could perform by themselves. Usually, there are four phases when it comes to successful data recovery, though that can vary depending on the type of data corruption and recovery required. To resolve this, software is used to correct the logical sectors of the media drive.
If this is not enough, the hardware containing the logical bad sectors must be replaced. The hard drive is repaired in order to get it running in some form, or at least in a state suitable for reading the data from it. They can often perform the recovery using remote access software over the Internet, LAN or other connection to the physical location of the damaged media. When a hard disk drive fails, the importance of getting the data off the drive is the top priority. For example, if heads are bad they need to be changed; if the PCB is faulty then it needs to be fixed or replaced; if the spindle motor is bad the platters and heads should be moved to a new drive. The longer a faulty drive is used, the more likely further data loss is to occur. Creating an image of the drive will ensure that there is a secondary copy of the data on another device, on which it is safe to perform testing and recovery procedures without harming the source.
This is the most common cause in a failing drive, meaning that data needs to be reconstructed to become readable. Corrupted documents can be recovered by several software methods or by manually reconstructing the document using a hex editor. Data damage can be caused when, for example, a file is written to a sector on the drive that has been damaged. After the drive has been cloned to a new drive, it is suitable to attempt the retrieval of lost data. If the drive has failed logically, there are a number of reasons for that. Using the clone it may be possible to repair the partition table or master boot record in order to read the file system's data structure and retrieve stored data.