Has your hard drive been damaged by flood?

We have received a number of requests for help and information at this time of recovery and repair from the terrible flooding events across Australia. To ensure the best chance of successful data recovery from flood-damaged hard drives, our engineers have put together the following advice:

1. Do not attempt to power up equipment damaged by water

If water has infiltrated the hard drive or electrical components, electrical power can leave the hard drive unrecoverable and it can become dangerous to anyone handling the hard drive.

2. Do not attempt to dry the hard drive – keep it wet

Often the first instinct with a water logged hard drive is to dry it out. This is not advisable however as it can cause further damage – contaminants not visible to the human eye can leave damaging residue on the hard drive platters and lead to circuit board corrosion. Keeping a hard drive wet can aid the data recovery. We recommends placing the hard disk in a sealed container or plastic bag to prevent it drying out until a data recovery engineer can examine the drive in a sterile environment.

3. Never assume that data is unrecoverable

No matter what it has been through data can sometimes still be recovered. Amongst the most remarkable case histories is NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia hard drive which plunged into a lake after falling 39 miles through space. Our engineers managed to recover 99 per cent of the information stored on the drive.

Free Consultation for Flood Affected Customers

Kroll Ontrack is offering all people dealing with flood damage a free hard drive consultation and evaluation.

Call our special toll-free flood relief hotline – 1800 782 259 for help and advice.

Special Data Recovery Service Option

Kroll Ontrack is also providing a heavily discounted flat fee of $850 per hard drive for desktop, laptop, notebook and external hard drive recoveries. [The usual price for this service can range up to $2,400 per drive.]

In addition, Kroll Ontrack is offering a 20% discount on recovery of servers, Storage Area Networks (SANs), VMware and tape media damaged by the flooding.

Kroll Ontrack Australia – Business As Usual

We were lucky – our data recovery laboratory and clean room is in West End, Brisbane and while the water came very close we were unaffected by the floods. We are the only data recovery company in Australia to offer a full suite of recovery solutions, enabling data recovery anywhere, anytime for any operating system, storage or media type and cause of data loss.