This article presents the procedure for sending your hard drive to Chronodisk for your data recovery. The entire CHRONODISK team wishes you a good read.

Here are the 9 questions that come up most often before a data recovery.

On which brands and types of media can Chronodisk recover data?

Chronodisk handles all brands and formats of hard drives, whether “Internal” or “External” and regardless of their storage capacity.
Our experts specialize in the different RAID systems (0, 1, 5), as well as NAS – SAN servers, whether hardware or software based, running Linux, VMWare, FusionDrive…
Our data recovery lab also works on USB flash drives and various types of memory cards (SD, CompactFlash, MemoryStick, SSD …).

What precautions should you take before packing your hard drive?

If you need to send us your storage media (hard drive, SSD, USB flash drive, RAID, memory card) by courier or carrier, you must pack it with great care. We recommend 3 layers of protection:
– wrap each hard drive in soft protective material (bubble wrap, foam, etc…)
– place the hard drive(s) in a rigid box (and not in a soft envelope, even a padded one — this offers no protection against impact)
– secure the hard drive(s) by filling any empty space with paper, foam, or any other material that keeps the hard drive from moving inside the box.
You can also put your hard drive in an antistatic bag, but it offers no additional protection, let’s be clear about that!

You can discover and share your tips on our forum

Can a hard drive simply be repaired?

No, our experts only repair a hard drive in the cleanroom to enable a cloning operation (a process that can take anywhere from 2 hours to more than 1000 hours depending on the size and degree of damage to the hard drive). After that, we can carry out a reconstruction of the hard drive’s data. But repairing the hard drive alone, if it’s plugged back into a computer as is, almost always results in the read heads crashing onto the platters within the first minutes or hours of normal use.

There are 2 main types of failures: logical failures and physical failures. Some are harmless to your data but others can damage it or destroy it permanently. WARNING: stop using your hard drive or device if it has suffered an impact or a fall, an electrical issue, or if you hear an unusual noise inside (clicking, beeping, grinding, etc…). We offer a 100% free, no-obligation quote that lets you have your storage media (hard drive, SSD, USB flash drive, RAID, memory card) diagnosed within a few hours. Take advantage of this service to find out the type of failure, the timeframe, and the best price for recovering your data. You can benefit from free pickup within mainland France.

My hard drive just failed, what should I do and not do?

Even without any apparent severity, one failure can hide another. Hard drive failures can compound, and very often, when our customers insist on restarting their hard drive several times, that’s when they end up worsening the initial failure, sometimes to the point of permanently destroying any chance of recovering the files and folders.
Chronodisk offers a 100% free, no-obligation quote. Even though we often have to use costly new spare parts (between €50 and €300) in the cleanroom for repairing the hard drive, cloning it, and then recovering the data, you only pay if we recover your data. This is a clean, results-based guarantee exclusive to Chronodisk — rare enough in the world to be worth pointing out.

My hard drive / USB flash drive works, can I recover data that was deleted by mistake?

Yes, we can often (though not always) recover data that was deleted by mistake or by formatting, even if you have written new data over it… It all depends on the amount of data overwritten, the space the old data occupied, and the free space remaining on your mistakenly erased hard drive. In the case of formatting, without overwriting the partition or writing new files, data recovery is very often complete and free of any data corruption, with the entire folder structure intact.

Without a low-level format (also known as a manufacturer or factory format), your storage media retains traces of the data it previously held. Often, it’s only the file summary/catalog that has been destroyed and that therefore needs to be rebuilt, usually by software means. For a file to be recoverable, the entire chain of information must be intact, otherwise the file in question will be corrupted and unusable.
Chronodisk offers a data recovery service for cases of accidental deletion, formatting, system reinstallation, or virus / malware / ransomware attacks.

My hard drive is encrypted, what happens in that case?

To recover encrypted data, it is essential to know the password, or to have the encryption key, certificate, or token for the hard drive.

If you have lost the encryption keys or if you have forgotten the password, we will not attempt to recover your data, as it would be impossible in any case.
They protect your documents without encrypting them. If you have any doubt about the protection you have installed on your hard drive, contact us.
File testing is only possible if the files are decrypted.

That said, we can bypass ATA passwords used to access hard drives, or passwords on Microsoft Office documents. It happens fairly often that a serious malfunction in a hard drive’s firmware triggers a password prompt at startup. Only in this case will repairing the firmware (by software or hardware means) allow us to unlock the hard drive for reading / writing and fully reconstruct the data on the media. In a number of cases, this operation also requires replacing the read heads in the cleanroom.

How can I send my hard drive to the lab?

It is important to choose a tracking option with the carrier of your choice.

Don’t forget to include the completed and printed form corresponding to your hard drive or RAID in the same package.

Chronodisk Laboratory
20-22 rue Louis Armand
75015 Paris

When we return your recovered data to you, a copy is kept on our servers for seven days. During this period, we can make a new copy free of charge in case of any issues.

What are the success rates for recovering my data?

100% when the internal platters of the hard drive are perfectly healthy. Only 30% when it involves a hard drive falling onto a hard surface while actively reading / writing. In this latter case the read heads crash badly onto the platters, which end up severely scratched. This is why it’s worth entrusting your hard drive to Chronodisk: if the internal platters are too damaged and recovery is impossible, you pay nothing. No quote fee, no spare parts, no engineer’s work. Rather reassuring, isn’t it? Especially if you look elsewhere, you’ll find that the quote itself is (sometimes) charged between €50 and €120, and that spare parts are (very often) charged between €150 and €400… even if the data recovery fails.

Will I recover all of my data?

NO lab can guarantee you 100% that your data will be recovered in full and in good working condition without having first carried out a thorough diagnostic in the lab and the actual recovery of the data. We have the best tools to try several extraction methods when the files don’t come out properly. As soon as extraction is complete, our technicians check the priority files you specified to us. And a listing in .txt or .rtf format is immediately sent to you by email.

There you will find all the folder and file names, organized in a tree structure just like in your Windows, Linux, or Mac file explorer. Once you have reviewed and approved this listing, we will start copying the data onto a healthy, blank storage medium (hard drive, SSD, USB flash drive, RAID, memory card). We do not recover software or your operating system. These are made up of a set of files and folders working together.

If one of them is missing or damaged, your system will not be able to function properly. This is why it is not possible to directly reinstall, into your computer, an internal drive holding the operating system and software.

We also invite you to read: The Steps of Your Data Recovery