LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Hard Drive Recovery: Failures
built 648 days ago
Servers such as Dell Powervault Raid or Dell Poweredge Raid with Raid 0 can be a very bad decision when a hard drive failure occurs. Even bad sectors on a Raid 5 can create havoc. If too many bad sectors are detected on the array, the raid 5 may take itself offline and declare the failing drive as bad causing a MISSING ELEMENT to appear in the raid controller. For Raid 0, a bad drive will wipe the array volume info completely. The solution is of course pretty simple, recover a mirror of the failing hard drive and restore the array with a clone of the failed hard drive. Raid 0 is a bit more tricky because the controller has no function to rebuild the array, you must recreate the raid 0 array and replace the partition table and boot sector with original stored usually on Hard Drive 0
Source:
A hard drive crash is far more damaging than that of a floppy drive or DVD failure. This is because the most recent and critical information is stored on the hard drive.
Source:
If the hard drive has suffered physical failure, proper electronic knowledge and equipment is a must. A soldering iron might prove useful when working on a damaged circuit board. Advanced tools such as magnetometers may ... be used to physically extract lost bits from the magnetic media. These bits are used to rebuild a disk image.
Source:
The first step is to determine if it really is hard drive failure you are experiencing. Did you install any new hardware since your last successful boot-up? If so, unplug those devices and try to re-boot.
Source:
LaCie Big Disk USB hard drives over 250GB are especially at risk. These LaCie Big Disk USB drives contain 2 hard drives in a raid 0 configuration. The heat from 2 hard drives in a non ventilated enclosure causes hard drive failure more often because of the heat. The solution of course is to have multiple backups of your data. USB drive Format message
Source:
Just remember, a "hard drive failure" error message does not necessarily mean all is lost. You have a range of tips, tools and techniques that may bring the drive back to life, or at least help you recover some of your important data.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Failures