Data recovery is typically thought of in regards to physical damage to a hard drive that renders files impossible to read or retrieve.

However, logical hard drive failure – damage to a drive that isn’t physical or mechanical in nature – can cause the same kinds of effects, even though the disk itself is intact. That’s because logical hard drive failure stems from information that is stored on the disk, rather than the disk itself. In other words, bad sectors, data corruption, and disk-write errors make the drive impossible to read. For this reason, logical hard drive problems can often be misdiagnosed and repaired incorrectly.

How Did This Happen?

Although the symptoms of logical hard drive failure are very similar to the ones associated with physical hard drive damage, the causes are very different.

In fact, the source of logical hard drive issues can usually be found in one of the following:

• Computer Viruses and Malware
• Accidental File Deletion
• Formatting or Partial Formatting of the Drive
• System Crashes
• Hardware and Firmware Conflicts
• Power Surges and Brownouts
• Accidental Drive Cloning
• Software and Operating System Corruption
• How do I know if my Hard Drive is experiencing a Logical Failure?
• Symptoms of logical failure can be similar to those of a physically damaged hard drive, including the failure of a computer to boot from the affected hard drive, problems reading the disk or particular files and folders, and having the drive disappear from your operating system.
• In each case, the underlying issue can corrupt the data or file structure of the affected hard drive. The good news about logical hard drive failure is that, if it is properly recognized and diagnosed by a trained team of data recovery experts, these types of repairs tend to be the quickest and least expensive.