What should you pay attention to during the data recovery process in case of a HDD failure? What steps should be taken to determine whether the issue is hardware or software-related? Should you seek professional help for recovery or is user intervention possible? What are your recommendations in terms of both security and data integrity?
HDD failure: What should be considered during the data recovery process?
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On HDDs, similar to the TRIM command on SSDs, optimization processes are occasionally performed to organize free space on the disk. However, unlike SSDs, this does not extend the HDD's lifespan; it only temporarily improves performance. A similar situation applies to data recovery: for example, if you remove an SD card from a camera and connect it directly to a computer without shutting down the system, files may unexpectedly be deleted, or the card's file system may become corrupted. The same carelessness on an HDD can lead to physical damage to the platters or displacement of the read/write head during operation.
Just as you need to be cautious of voltage fluctuations when manually adjusting fan curves in MSI Afterburner, you should use a power supply with voltage protection for HDD recovery. Power surges in older IDE drives can corrupt metadata in the file system, while in modern SATA drives, they can lead to lost segments in the file tables. Therefore, when using recovery software (such as TestDisk), you should mount the disk in "read-only" mode—just as you would test in a game using the "demo only" option—to prevent any changes to the original data, similar to resetting overclock settings in the BIOS.
The hard drive suddenly goes *click-clack* and at first I thought my PC was trying to send me Morse code 😅 Then I realized: "Oh right, that's a HDD failure…" Now I'm better off making backups first instead of data recovery! 🙈