How to recover data from crashed hard drive

dblacharski

Yes, it's true that everyone should know better, and should be backing up data to an off-site facility on a regular basis. But, in reality, it doesn't always happen, and a crashed hard drive can still be disastrous. When that does happen (and eventually, it will), after steps 1 and 2 (cursing and pulling out one's hair), what comes next? What is involved in data recovery, and how do I know whether my data is lost forever? Or, can I try to recover it?

Topic: Security
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Siu PoNing
Vote Up (1)

Even if the hard drive was crashed, it is possible to recover data from it. As long as the data is nor overwritten. Generally speaking,  crash in a hard dirve or a storage device result from partition error, you may can fix them by formatting, but you will lost all the data. Thus, you have to recover the data first. I has a similar experience before, my gf' s laptop had a hard drive error and counld not boot normally, and I have to  formate the hard drive to reinstall the system, but it was at the price of data loss. After system reinstalling, I googled a software to recover data from the laptop's hard drive, you can get the  version without paying to see whether you data are still there, know more here: http://memory-card-data-reovery.blogspot.com/2013/03/hard-drive-data-rec...

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Vote Up (2)

 

Recovery Data Software is a recovery tool which helps you to recover all the crashed files from the hard driver. This software supports FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS and NTFS5 file systems and can repair all types of drives like IDE, EIDE, SATA, SDSI, PEN, ZIP etc.

jimlynch
Vote Up (15)

Hi dblacharski,

Popular Mechanics has a helpful article about how to recover data from a dead hard disk:

Don't Panic! How to Recover Data From a Dead Hard Drive
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/tips/4294038

Snippet:

"Let's dispense with the I-told-you-sos. If you find yourself facing a data recovery job, then you have probably forgotten the cardinal rule of computing: All hard drives eventually fail. And you didn't back up your data, did you? We've been there—hey, everybody has to learn this lesson once. Now what?

Panic!

Just kidding. Actually, the first thing to do is determine if it really is a hard-drive failure you're confronting, and not one of the countless other equipment glitches that can cause a boot failure.

Read more: Hard Drive Data Recovery - How to Recover Data from a Dead Hard Drive - Popular Mechanics "

sspade
Vote Up (21)

The lesson every computer user learns the hard way is to back up their data. It is not a matter of whether a hard drive will fail, but when.  20 years ago, there were several tools that were quite helpful in recovering lost data from Windows and Macintosh-formatted hard drives, but as the drives have gotten larger and our operating systems have become more complex, the number of available data recovery tools and the quality of those tools has decreased considerably.

 

The first step to take if your hard drive fails is to shut down your machine and try not to panic. Keeping your emotions in check is important to not making mistakes throughout the recovery process.

Commercial programs like Iolo Search and Recover, PC Inspector, and HigherGround Hard Drive Mechanic can help you to recover your hard drive, provided you can mount the failed drive in another computer. This usually requires removing the failed hard drive from your computer and attaching it to a USB-based external drive kit (available for desktop and notebook drives with either ATA or SATA connectors). You’ll want to insure that the external drive kit is USB 2.0 compatible, or it can take a large amount of time to recover your data, because USB 1.0 is much slower. You do not need to be an expert to run these tools, but it doesn’t hurt to employ an IT professional for jobs such as these because they’re often able to breeze through the data recovery process without spending a great deal of emotional energy.

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