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What is the first thing to do before performing any hard drive repairs or data recovery operations for a professional data recovery engineer? Usually it is to clone one copy of the patient disk in consideration of safety and intact source disk. No matter how simple the problem may seem at first sight, operating on a cloned disk offers a good safety solution in case the recovery doesn’t go as you expected or accidently causes more damage.

Having the patient disk imaged primarily has following advantages:

• You can perform the hard drive repairs on the cloned disk. If the repairs meet you expectation, you still have the unmodified source disk, so you could create another cloned disk to try again.
• For the disk with bad sectors and clicking noise (caused by incompatibility after carrying out hot swap), generally repairs cannot be made to the source disk. Therefore to protect the source disk from further damaging there should be a professional disk imager which can deal with bad sectors and clicking noise to clone a copy of the source disk; common software and some traditional disk copier can make it on this point.

With the above advantage, to clone the patient disk is a wise step; and considering the fact that cloning a patient disk to a good one takes a considerable amount of time, we recommend to adopt Data Copy King which will help you finish the task efficiently. DCK can clone the disk with bad sectors at 5.0GB/min in real-time; namely for a hard drive with 100GB DCK can finish the task in 20 minutes; much more the hard drive in good condition at 7.0GB/min Meanwhile If repairs do not bring the desired results (access to your data) or even make matters worse, you can undo all repairs you have made with DCK to clone a new destination disk in minutes.

Then I will recommend a safe and practical data recovery flow:

According to the data recovery flow chat, some tools from SalvationDATA Technology are practical and helpful.

• DATA COPY KING—Data backup/clone the patient hard drive
• HPE PRO–Mechanical component exchanging(head stack, spindle motor etc)
• HDD DOCTOR—Drive diagnosis & restoration
• DATA COMPASS/ FILE EXTRACTOR—Data extraction
Notes:
• If the HDD is in unstable condition you should keep in mind that each time you read that could be the last time. Clone this disk as soon as you can!
• The destination hard drive for the clone should be at least the same size as the source hard drive or greater. If the destination one is smaller than the source one, DCK will warn you. Obviously, if there is not enough space on destination hard drive, a part of the source one will not be cloned completely;

Attentions that DCK is able to tackle the hard drives only which can be detected by BIOS with intact boot up file.