Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

Buzz words for common HD physical failures
As a beginner of data restoration and data recovery, I would like to have a quick-list/terse description, from your experiences, of the jargon used by end-users, newbie to intermediate, that often indicate to you common imminent or existing HD physical failures. Dr.Luke, elsewhere, gently advised me to be more careful in offering advice which will not work under certain HD physical failures.

One example of buzz words, jargon...courtesy of Dr_Luke
(Bold & underline mine; bold I call jargon, underline represents the physical damage.)

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id- ... cters.html

...you (Roland) need to understand the problem before you can offer a solution. The drive spins, clicks and then spins down. This means that it is impossible to clone. The heads are unable to read the service tracks, either because the heads are damaged or the service tracks are damaged. In both cases, clean room data recovery is the only option.

SMART, sector re-allocation...imminent HD failure; cloning or full imaging time

One set of famous buzz word, jargon, used by newbies and intermediate end-users:
"SMART", "sector re-allocation", "sector allocation..." and so on. I realize that although this is hard-drive in the process of physically failing, often there is time to at least clone or full image the hard-drive. Such hard-drives often time spans from several days to a few hours. Some has much more time, some have much less time. My questions to you data restoration/data recovery specialists: How do you convince, the newbie to intermediate to either clone or full image? What words or phrases do you find most successful in prodding end-users to do what is in their best interest?