How to Recover Data From Hard Drive

Author: Sayaka Jess

A hard drive doesn’t just suddenly crash; the computer must have shown signs such as noise coming from the hard drive, error message pop-ups, frozen programs, and overall strange performance of the computer. These are early signs that your hard drive is failing. If you don’t do anything about it while it is still showing these basic signs, it will become worse, and eventually, pack up. If your computer shows any of these signs, then your hard drive may have crashed:

  • blue screen (blue Screen of death)
  • loud noise from the hard drive
  • Error message when booting
  • The computer doesn’t start at all

If you didn’t back up your files before this, you might lose your documents forever to the crashed Hard Drive, but if you want to recover data from the crashed hard drive, here are some basic tips that will help.

What to Do If You Want to Recover Data From Your Crashed Hard Drive

Sometimes, people assume that their hard drive is bad when it is not. To confirm whether a hard drive has crashed, remove the hard drive and connect it to a good computer. It is safe to use a USB universal drive adapter; FireWire cable can be used for a mac book. If the hard drive is recognized by the alternative computer after connecting it, then you can access your files from "my computer," and copy and paste all your important documents into the alternative computer. On the other hand, after connecting the hard drive to a working computer and it still doesn’t perform normally, then the hard drive has crashed.

Install an app that can recover data from the hard drive

Before you do this, make sure that the anti-virus/anti-malware on the alternative computer is up to date. Then download and install a data recovery software. You can install bootable linuxdistros for drive recovery, or recuva for windows, or file salvage for mac OS X. Using any of these tools to recover data from the crashed hard drive will work, although the recovered documents will be disorganized. The data recovery software will arrange the documents according to format – all JPEG files will be put in a JPEG folder, all word format files will be put in a word folder, etc. What’s more important is to recover data from the damaged hard drive.

Take The Hard Drive to a Pro

After trying the method above and it still doesn’t work, it could be that the Hard Drive has been overwritten, wiped, or physically destroyed. Regardless of this, you can still recover data from the hard drive but this time, it will cost more money, within the range of $500 to $3000. Take the hard drive to a pro, a computer technician who specializes in data recovery from Hard Drive. Depending on how much damage has been done to the hard drive, the technician will give you a price quote and then start the process. The process will take some time – days, two weeks or more, this also depends on how damaged the hard drive is, and the storage capacity of the hard drive. In any case, you are guaranteed that the pro will recover data not less than 99 percent from the destroyed hard drive.

Bonus tip: there are two types of hard drive crash that can make it hard to recover data from a hard drive.

  • Logical damage: usually caused by a corrupt file or accidental formatting, and this affects only the files on the hard drive, not the physical components.
  • Mechanical damage: this happens when the hard drive has been physically damaged; maybe it is broken or exposed to liquid, or any other condition that can destroy the physical components of the hard drive. It doesn’t erase the files.

To summarize, ensure that you always back up your important documents, pay attention to your computer, when you start noticing any strange signs, tackle it immediately. Lastly, don’t give your hard drive to a quack technician.