Hard drive data is commonly not back up or at least not backed up as often as it should be.  Still, there is a lard amount of data lost every day due to physical damage to the hard drive.  So there are two industries that surround this area, one is the preemptive backup solution with online data storage companies springing up all the time.  One of the best is Mozy, which offers a free and pay solution and helps people easily recover lost data should a failure to a hard drive occur.   Second, is a data recovery industry that includes retrieving data from a corrupt hard drive.  It probably goes without stating but the option to backup instead of attempting to recover is desirable from several points.  It’s less expensive to backup than trying to recover.  It’s also less much less of a hassle to restore than it is to try and recover data.  Recovery of data is not 100% guaranteed and at times is not recovered at all.

If you are reading this than there is a chance that your data has been corrupted and that recovery is your only option.  Recovery can be very expensive, so you may want to weigh the value of the data versus just walking away from it.  You may even decide to DIY and attempt a data recovery all on your own.  This might be best if the data is not critical and its recovery not 100% needed.  The people that do data recovery are professionals that have been trained and they have a very high rate of success.

If you decide to take a run at fixing it yourself you will want to make sure the drive is actually dead.  You will want to do some research online to find out how to test to see if it is dead and you will also want to research your manufactures site to see what if messing with the drive will void the warranty.  They may also have suggestion on how to check to see if the drive is dead.  If you have any doubts you should just leave the drive alone and seek professional advice.

You will do best to seek out professional services and have the data professionally recovered and moving forward with a regularly scheduled online data backup plan.