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If you have experienced inability to retrieve stored files from your computer, chances are you may have a data crash. This could happen due to physical or logical problem with your hard drive.

Physical refers to external damage to the hard drive component such as platter, circuit board failure and motor malfunction. Logical problems are internal failures due to virus attack and accidentally deletion of files and so on.

How to tell if you are facing possible data crash? You can usually know by strange noises produced by your computer, such as grinding, scraping, buzzing and clicking.

The above symptoms are indicating the possibility of a head crash. Because hard drive have an operational spinning speed of 3600 to 15000 RPM, severe damage can be done in a very short amount of time. This can result in damage to the head, loss of data and damage to disk surface or a combination of all three.

In this event, you will have to act instantly to firstly avoid further damage to your stored data and secondly, to preserve the damage in its original state. The first thing you want to do is to power off immediately. Do not even use the 'shut down' command, just switch off from the main source. This is because if you shut down, temporary files could overwrite any precious data.

Even if you are working on a particularly important document at the time of the crash, do not attempt to edit, save or retrieve anything. Remember that your hard drive could be severly corrupted very quickly and the goal here is to preserve the original state of the damage in order to recover not one, but all your files.

If your computer tell you that it cannot detect the hard disk, refrain from rebooting repeatedly especially if you face the same outcome after the initial reboot. If there has been a data crash, you risk damaging the head by having it scratching against the disk, damaging the disk surface at the same time.

The greater the damage, the lesser your chance in recovering your data. However, in approximately 80% of the time, data recovery is possible.