Although a hard drive is not the most essential section of computer, it is ought to be the most important part to you. All your data are stored on the hard drive-- important files, precious pictures and videos, collected songs, crucial data, all your programs. However, sometimes a hard drive is sick and will recover with a quick fix or just stop working that means it is dead. There is clicking sound coming from your hard drive, or you are unable to access your photos, or music on it. All data on your computer are gone! What a disaster it will be! Luckily, there are still hopes for data recovery in some cases.
Hard drives can crash or go bad for a number of reasons.
Firstly, check out what is the cause.Remove the hard drive of your computer and install it into another computer that has a Windows operating system on as a slave drive. Check to see if the motherboard is causing the problem. The motherboard could be causing similar problems. If so, consider it as a lesson and copy your data to another drive.
If the hard drive can be detected (shows up in ‘my computer’ as drive letter like drive G:) but you can’t access your data on it, you can recover data from crashed hard drive with third party data recovery program. I have a good one on my computer that can recover data after deeply scanning your hard drive to look for lost data due to drives crash, physical damage, system sabotage, virus corrupted partitions etc.
Download data recovery program Tenorshare Data Recovery and install it on the computer not the bad hard drive. Do not attempt to install or write anything on the drive, as it may overwrite the data you want to recover.
Step 1: Run Tenorshare Data Recovery. If you accidentally deleted files on the drive, select ‘Deleted Recovery’. If you accidentally formatted the drive, being attacked by virus or unable to access your data, select ‘Format Recovery’. Hard disk crashes, power failure, system sabotage, etc may result in data loss. ‘Partition Recovery’ will be available for you. If the files are seriously damaged and you can’t recover them with deleted recovery and format recovery. Raw Recovery is available for you.
Step 2: Select the logical or physical hard drive that contains your lost data. (A logical drive means a partition or virtual drive and a physical drive means a whole hard drive. Some drives are divided in to multiple partitions. )Click ‘Scan’ to deeply search for lost data.
Step 3: Select the files list on the taskbar and click ‘Recover’ to start data recovery.
Step 4: Select a path for the recovered files. Click ‘OK’ to complete recovery.
If the hard drive can’t be detected by your computer, you can try this way.
Put the hard drive in a plastic bag to be compatible for the freezer. Freezing sometimes works to revive a dying hard drive, at least for a short time(Probable just about 20 minutes), but be sure that the bag is sealed tightly so that condensation and ice crystals don't form. Put it in your freezer for 24 hours that will do the trick. While it’s still cold, plug it into your computer.
Check to see if the hard drive shows up. If it does, quickly go to where your data is stored and transfer it over to another drive. Once the drive warms up, you may be unable to access your data again. If it still doesn't boot, send it to professionals.
There is no guarantee that any of these methods will work. You may still lose your data. The only way to prevent data loss when dealing with computers is to make backups of important data on an external hard drive or flash drive.
Recovering hard drive data can be a difficult and complex task. You may want to bring the hard drive to a professional data recovery company which will cost you $1000 or more. This is a pricey way that is no guarantee for data recovery. But if the lost data is valuable, it may be a better option than do it yourself.
Tips: With enough effort you can probably find freeware or shareware to recover any hard drive. But commercial software distributors can usually charge the prices they charge because their software does the job better and more quickly.
