As Americans, we pride ourselves on self-sufficiency, problem-solving, and autonomy.  And in fact, in regards to that third one (autonomy), the information-age has give us even more opportunity to express ourselves.  As one writer recently put it, anyone with a couple thousand dollars can build their own ‘factory.’  And in this factory, information can be produced, distributed and sold.

In many cases, this desktop factory can make you rich.  At the same time, it can become your worst nightmare, your biggest problem, and your reason for insanity.  But only if you do stupid things, like try and fix your own hard drive when it crashes one day.  Remember, about 140,000 hard drives crash every day.  That still leaves you with pretty good odds that yours won’t be one of them, but it could.  And when and if it does happen to you, please do yourself a favor.  Protect that factory and call a professional.

Here’s what we see happen instead…

A customer attempts to boot their system up for the day and finds that dreaded blue screen of death or finds that the computer continues to lock and won’t load.  And in addition, their hard drive may be making some noise that doesn’t sound like it should be there.  In any case, it becomes clear that the hard drive is not working properly.  In fact, you might even get a message on your screen telling you just that.

Instead of stopping right there (the smart thing to do), this customer presses on in the American spirit of ingenuity and begins the process of trying to figure out exactly what is happening and make an earnest attempt to fix the problem.

They might go online looking for recovery software, which is easy to find.  Or they might just use software that came with their system or that is accessible on their machine.  In any case, they make one of the biggest mistakes we see people making in this scenario.  They proceed like a blind man across a crowded and unfamiliar city street.

In almost ALL cases like this one, the work that the individual attempts to perform leads to even more data loss, and often totally prevents our ability to recover lost hard drive data.  A completely unnecessary, unwanted result that is easy to avoid by simply backing away from your keyboard, picking up the telephone and calling in the SWAT team.  In this case, that would be us.

The truth is that even if that cheap recovery software could do the job in your case, your cost for data recovery upon sending it to us would be small.  Easy recovery = much lower costs on our end.

More importantly, it almost NEVER works and once you start futzing with your own hard drive, there exists a direct correlation between each thing you do and the amount of further data loss that occurs.

The other very important point about all that cheap software you can use to make your recovery attempt, is that MOST cases are more complicated than that little piece of software (sometimes freeware) can address.

Remember, we spend hours each week researching and studying the make-up of hard drives and the software that runs them.  We are a leader in our industry in this area.  By the time you download a piece of cheap software online, it is likely that the firmware that controls your hard drive has been updated multiple times and you are now attempting to fix your problem with an outdated tool.  Kind of like trying to pump your car tires up with your bike pump.  It might work, but you’ll never get all the air back-in and it will take forever!

Remember, we charge you NOTHING until we know we can recover your data.  And even then, you get to see your files and decide whether or not you want us to do the work.  So, there’s no risk required on your end.

The only thing required on your end is a little trust in us and some common sense.  It’s OK, I’m sure you’re really good at solving many other problems better than we are.  But this one you should leave to the SWAT team.