If your hard drive is physically damaged, meaning that it has for example experienced an excessive shock, dropped to the floor, broken, short-circuited, fallen into the sea, etc. then it is likely that the computer BIOS (Basic Input Output System) may not be able to recognise it. A physical damage can be either electrical or mechanical in nature. In such cases, the drive must first be either repaired using spare parts, for instance, or it must be opened up in a specialised cleanroom (a dust free medium) where its magnetic content is copied to another disk by the aid of sophisticated laboratory equipment, after which data recovery may become possible.



A cleanroom is an environment, typically used in manufacturing or scientific research, as well as data recovery centres, that has a low level of environmental pollutants such as dust, airborne microbes, aerosol particles and chemical vapours. More accurately, a cleanroom has a controlled level of contamination that is specified by the number of particles per meter-cubed and by maximum particle size.

The air entering a cleanroom from outside is filtered to exclude dust, and the air inside is constantly re-circulated through high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) and ultra low penetration air (ULPA) filters to remove internally generated contaminants. Staff enter and leave through air locks (sometimes including an air shower stage), and wear protective clothing such as hats, face masks, boots and cover-alls. Equipment inside the cleanroom is designed to generate minimal air contamination. Common materials such as paper, pencils, and fabrics made from natural fibres are often excluded. Low-level cleanrooms are often not sterile (i.e., free of uncontrolled microbes) and more attention is given to airborne particles. Particle levels are usually tested using a particle counter.

Some cleanrooms are kept at a higher air pressure so that if there are any leaks, the air rushes outside. This is similar to the lower pressure used in biological hot zones to keep the microbes inside.

Maintenance of such laboratories is hence implicitly costly and companies running a cleanroom facility need to manage their budget so as to cover up these costs. Usually, this will be enforced upon the end user, i.e. customers.

Logical corruption, on the contrary can be catered for without the use of sophisticated laboratory equipment and can be done outside a cleanroom. Examples of logical damage to the media include:

Accidental formatting of Hard disk

Accidental Deletion of Data

Data Loss due to virus/spyware attacks

Boot & Partition Structure Corruption

Drive crashes

Human error

Backup failure

System boot error

Logical Data Recovery Centres, such as 'Data Recovery Console', utilise sophisticated software solutions making it ideal for your recovery requirements in terms of logically damaged disks as well as certain kinds of physical damages, such as development of hard drive bad sectors, in that they could charge you much less compared to any other recovery service. Other recovery companies need to charge extra amounts in order to cover their sophisticated laboratory's maintenance costs, a feature that is not necessary for many of their clients (about 70%). Companies such as Data Recovery Console simply won't carryout sophisticated laboratory work and concentrate on logically damaged disks, hence reducing the overall cost for you.

What ever the reason for your data loss, if your drive is recognised by the computer BIOS a logical data recovery specialist should be able to extract your data, given that you act promptly. So if you happen to be among the 70% of the people who are experiencing a logical data corruption, then look out for those logical data recovery centres who will charge you much less and avoid the high costs!