Here are some signs, tips and advice to help ensure the best chances for a successful recovery:

Physically damaged REQUIRE CLEAN ROOM EXPERTISE.  In general, Physical recoveries are much more expensive than Logical recoveries. Some signs of physical damage might include clicking, grinding, or other unusual sounds.

• DO NOT shake, hit, freeze or otherwise attempt to work on your drive yourself is your data is important.  In fact, do not even clean your drive-even if it was involved in fire or flood. improper handling will ruin or lessen your chances of a successful recovery.
  *** NOTE: If you drive was wet (flood, submerged, etc) it is considered best practice to leave the drive in a container of the same water. Or at minimum, keep the drive moist/wet (ziploc bag, etc).  DO NOT dry out the drive!!!
• DO NOT even attempt to power on any hard drive that contains critically important data after it has been dropped!  We can often open such drives in the clean room and fix these cases easily.  If you power on such a drive, you may scratch the platter surfaces lessening the chances of recovery.
• DO NOT power on any drive or computer that shows signs of electrical problems.
• DO NOT use any type of recovery software on a physically damaged drive, as this is often destructive to data. Feel free to call for explanations as to why this is the case.

If your hard drive is suffering from LOGICAL problems you might see the following types of messages depending on your operating system (Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Unix, etc):

"No Operating system" , "No boot drive"

NEVER run CHKDSK or FSCK on a damaged drive as data could be permanently lost.