Data recovery can be a long, tedious and irritating process. Data recovery is what most computer users want to avoid. Sometimes, you can´t. When secondary storage media such as hard drives, floppy disks, CDs and other devices fail or become corrupted, data recovery is a possible option. The most typical data recovery scenario involves recovering data from an entire failed operating system, usually after a cataclysmic system crash. A second common scenario is a disk-level failure, involving a failed hard disk. The third most common data recovery scenario involves deleted single files, which are the easiest files to recover.

If you are faced with any of the above three scenarios, you need to have a data recovery strategy. Each scenario calls for a different strategy to access and safely copy the data to another storage medium. Different strategies include: replacing a failed printed circuit board with a new board in the disk drive itself, and imaging the disk using a specially-designed program that can implement error correcting codes, which reorganize corrupted or damaged data into readable forms. Either of these strategies can be used on failed drives, but physically damaged drives are almost impossible to fix if the damage is severe enough.