Data Recovery cases and failure symptoms

• Drive is not shown in BIOS drive table
• Drive is shown in BIOS drive table with a wrong, garbled or generic name
• Drive is making repeating, continuous, unusual noise on startup
• You cannot hear the usual spin-up sound from the drive
• You receive "Operating System Not Found" message on startup
• Windows 2000/XP crashes on startup when the problematic hard disk drive is connected to the computer
• When you click on the drive letter in "My computer" the message is displayed "Disk is not formatted". "The disk in drive <drive letter> is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"
• You accidentally reformatted the volume, possibly to another filesystem
• You deleted the important file(s)
• You reinstalled the operating system onto the volume containing important data
• The process of merging or resizing the partition has crashed
• Drive was retrieved from fire or water
• Drive was dropped when it was on or off
• Drive in USB enclosure is unreadable after unsafe unplugging from the PC
• Drive was subjected to electrical shock, wrong polarity plugging or lightning strike