Written by tc | Posted in Recover Lost Files |

There are four principal ways to recover data from crashed hard drive partitions. This article introduces the four ways briefly the highlight the ease with which each method can be completed.

The first method involves removing the internal drive and using an external drive case to read the disks contents. These external drive casings are now widely available and come with a USB cable connection to convert your internal drive into an external storage device. This facilitates connecting the external drive to a secondary PC or laptop in order to copy over the internal drives contents. The hard drive can then be reused as an external storage device for doing backups or storing other files.

The second method involves booting your Windows PC using the LINUX operating system. To do this, you need to download and burn to CD a copy of a Linux live CD (e.g. Puppy LINUX). You then need to reconfigure your BIOS settings to prioritize booting the operating system from the CD drive. Insert the Linux CD and restart your computer. The machine will boot up using the LINUX operating system without affecting any of your Windows operating system files, and you’ll be able to connect up an external HDD and copy over critical files from your internal drive.

The third approach involves using PC/computer repair software to attempt to fix the issues that caused your drive to crash. If you know how to fix computer errors manually then you could try this first, but tools such as HDD Regenerator can repair disk faults and software like Reimage can rectify operating system issues and require little or no manual intervention.

The fourth approach is to resort to using data recovery software to salvage your files. There are many data recovery applications to consider (including freeware options like Undelete Plus) that can scan the drive looking for lost data clusters and amalgamate these fragments into recognizable documents. This really only works however if Windows is able to start correctly for you, as running these applications from a DOS window can be a very time consuming process.

Of course, if each of these four methods fail to recover data from crashed hard drive sectors for you then try contacting a data recovery expert. These services have their own specialist software and mechanical tools for reading and cloning hard drive data, even in the event of the disk having mechanical/component damage.

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