How to Recover Data from a Crashed Hard Drive

If you are a technician, then you probably know that hard drive failures are inevitable. Chances are that sooner or later it will happen to someone you support or possibly even you.  The good news is that there are lots of great recovery tools and methods out there and I would like to share them with you.

Connect the Drive to Another Computer

Before you can do any work on the crashed drive you will need to remove it from the current machine and connect it to another machine as a secondary drive.  The best way to do this is to use a USB to IDE/SATA adapter.  If you don’t have one available then you may be able to connect the drive to another desktop computer internally as a secondary drive.  If you do, make sure that the machine detects the drive in the BIOS or you won’t be able to access it once the computer starts up.

Try to Copy the Data to Another Drive

After you connect the drive to another computer either internally or with the USB adapter, check to see if you can browse the contents of the drive.  If you can, try to copy data off that you would like to recover.  There is a chance that only the operating system is corrupt and the user data is still fine.

Use Data Recovery Software

If you can’t manually copy the user data off then you can try to recover it using data recovery software.  Whatever you do, do not install the recovery software on to the drive that you are trying to recover data from. Doing so could actually overwrite files that you want to restore.

PC Hard Drive Recovery

RECUVA

  

         

Recuva is a free hard drive recovery tool from Piriform (the makers of CCleaner) and is one of the best free PC data recovery tools available.  Even if the drive has been formatted, Recuva can scan the drive recover files. If the basic scan fails, there is also a deep scan to discover more deeply-buried results.  There is also a portable version if you don’t want to install the full version. When you launch Recuva, you will be presented with a wizard that will guide you through restoring your files.  First you will choose the type of file you need to recover, then the location, and then start the scan or choose “Enable Deep Scan” if the quick scan doesn’t find the files you need to recover.

PC Inspector File Recovery

 

 

PC Inspector File Recovery is the recovery software that I originally featured in this article back in 2006.  It’s still a decent recovery tool and can be used if you are unable to recover the files you need with Recuva.
When you launch PC Inspector File Recovery, you will need to choose your language. After this, you will be presented with a welcome screen giving you three options.
The first option is “Recover Deleted Files”. This allows you to restore files that have been permanently deleted from the drive. This will only work if the deleted file has not already been overwritten.
The second option is “Find Lost Data”. This allows you to recover data that has been lost due to a system crash. If you choose this option, you will be asked for the “start cluster” and “end cluster”. Leave the default settings to scan the whole drive. The scan could take a couple of hours depending on how large your drive is.
The third option is “Find Lost Drive”. Use this option if your drive letter is not showing up in Windows Explorer or My Computer. It will attempt to connect to the drive and if successful, allow you to browse the data.

Hiren’s BootCD

Hiren’s BootCD allows you to boot into a slimmed down version of Windows called MiniXP from the bootable CD or bootable flash drive and run diagnostic utilities on a problematic computer. Recuva is one of the utilities that comes bundled with Hiren’s so you can run it right from the CD. This is helpful if you don’t have a USB to IDE/SATA adapter or just don’t want to pull the drive from the machine.
You will need to connect another drive to the machine such as a USB flash drive or an external hard drive so you will have a place to copy your recovered data to.

GetDataBack

If the free utilities are not doing the trick then give GetDataBack a try.  GetDataBack is sold in two different versions, one for NTFS and the other for FAT files systems.  If you want to make sure it’s going to work first before you pay $79 for the NTFS version or $69 for the FAT version, they do have a demo version that will allow you to see what files it can recover.  If you like what you see, you can purchase the full version right then and there without even having to close out of the program.  I personally have had lots of success with GetDataBack when other recovery methods have failed.
After launching GetDataBack you will be asked to pick from a selection of data loss scenarios that the drive experienced.  If you aren’t sure, just select “I don’t know.”  After this you will select the drive, the partition on that drive, and then start the scan.

 

Put Your Hard Drive in the Freezer to Recover Data

If all other methods fail, there is one other nontraditional method that may allow you to recover files on your own.  To learn more, check out this post article titled Put Your Hard Drive In The Freezer To Recover Data.  This does not apply to solid state drives.