How To Recover A Crashed Hard Drive

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How To Recover A Crashed Hard Drive

The Perils Of Hard Drive Crashes

Hard drives can crash for a variety of different reasons. As well as the physical failure of the hardware it can also be down to corrupt, damaged, or infected system files. Human error can lead to the deletion of vital files from your system while being infected with spyware or viruses will inevitably cause some errors with your regular PC use. All instances of hard drive failure or hard drive crashes have one catastrophic factor in common – they can result in data loss. Data loss can be equally damaging for personal users as it can be for business users.

Why Backing Up Data Is Vital

As computer users we are constantly reminded of the perils of not backing up data on a regular basis. The more regularly we make a backup of important data the less of an impact data loss will have on us, however, it is impractical to back up data too regularly. Even a weekly backup can potentially mean the loss of a week's worth of data. Small scripts or applications can be used that routinely back up your entire hard drive and with the option of remote storage via an online service it is possible to protect the majority of your data from being lost.

Recovering Hard Drive Contents With No Backup

Even the most cautious of users may be subjected to some data loss. In these cases and with no recent backup there are still ways to recover the information that you may have otherwise lost. The most important step that will help to guarantee a greater recovery success is to not write any more data to the crashed hard drive. As you write more and more files on a crashed hard drive it will begin to replace and overwrite old data making it virtually impossible to recover the information from the old file.

Recovering Deleted Files From A Hard Drive

Manual recovery of information from a crashed hard drive can be done successfully by removing the hard drive from your computer and attaching it as a secondary drive to another computer. Fortunately when files are deleted they still remain resident on your hard drive but are marked as “deleted”. When you then attempt to save further information onto the hard drive these “deleted” files are considered to be empty space and can be used by any application to store data. This is true of any type of file, and application, and even hard drive partitions and operating systems.

Navigating Around Your Damaged Hard Drive

Once you have carefully removed your hard drive and replaced it into another computer you should be able to navigate through the contents of the hard drive including any files that you thought had been deleted. You can navigate through these files just using Windows Explorer.

Combating A Corrupt Operating System

This technique is typically only valid for files that have been deleted but it can also help to recover files from a hard drive with a damaged or corrupt operating system. With a damaged operating system it is not usually possible to boot the PC up to a usable state. By transferring the hard drive the operating system is still unusable but you will be able to retrieve any files and folders that were left on that hard drive.

Third Party Software

For other types of hard drive crashes and failures it can be much more difficult to retrieve information manually. In these cases your best bet will usually be the use of third party data recovery software or hiring a data recovery expert. Data recovery specialists can prove costly even after careful shopping around whereas recent developments in data recovery software has seen the price of these applications drop considerably. Now costing little or no more than any other software application it is possible to recover damaged hard drives and retrieve all information, even if it has been partially overwritten.

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