If a computer hard drive gets damaged, do your files get damaged as well?

Question

My question is lets say your computer hard drive gets damaged, and you have a big collection of music on there which i do, if you manage to extract the files from the damaged hard drive, will (lets say audio files) come out but sound all distorted because the files got damaged too when the hard drive was damaged? or is this not possible? thanks..

Answer 1

Not really. Since the archive is digital, it either works, or it doesn't.



It's not like analog where you can have consistency and operational status of the file, but with a lowering of quality. To the contrary, the file works as always or not at all.



This phenomenon extends to the HDMI cable. There are varying prices you can pay for various "quality" HDMI cables. But, it's a big scam. The signal is digital. One does not work better than another. It either works, or it doesn't. There is no in between. A $10 HDMI cable works just as well as a $75 Monster HDMI cable.



The same holds true with digital files. They work, or they don't. No quality loss from damage to the disk.

Answer 2

It depends on why the HDD failed. If they heads crashed, you will have some files that are damaged beyond repair. The rest, if you could recover them should be fine. Other types of failures wouldn't affect file integrity at all.



It's too late now if you have suffered a HDD failure, but this illustrates why you should always back up you HDD. My wife is paranoid about our digital photos, her machine is backed up nightly to an external drive, monthly I copy all of the photo folders to my machine and 2 - 3 times per year we burn the them all to DVD. I use a RAID 0+1 setup for my redundancy.

Answer 3

If you can copy the files off of the drive successfully, they should play just fine, just like they always did. the key will be if you can actually copy them off a damaged drive or not.

Answer 4

It's possible.



Mostly, if the files were sound files and you managed to recover them, they won't be distorted, but they are either:

- have no sound at all

- have 'skips', no sound on some part

- undamaged

Answer 5

maybe it all depends on the extent of the damage, if its just the other shell then no but if you damage inside it the films may become corrupt or missing parts.

Answer 6

it shouldn't unless the damage is suaver or there is a virus messing every thing up.