How to Recover Hard Drive Data

Contrary to opinion, the hard drive is not the most vital part of a computer, but it is probably the most important part to you. Why? It contains all your data -- every paper you have written, every digital picture, every music and video file, all your programs and games. When the hard drive stops working or gets accidently erased, to most it is worse than losing their wallet. Luckily, there are ways to recover data. See the steps below to see if you can get some of your data back.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Boot Windows using an alternate boot system, such as a USB or an external hard drive. If the disk you want to recover data from is the main system disk, you will have to boot from another source. If you try installing the recovery software on the disk with lost data, you risk writing over your data. You may have to change your boot source in the system bios (enter bios on system startup and select boot drive with working windows. Another option is to remove your drive and install it as a secondary drive on another computer.

2. Download the freeware data-recovery program PC Inspector (link below) and install on the working drive.

3. Run PC Inspector. If you accidentally deleted files on your hard disk, select "recover deleted files." If you formatted your disk accidentally or a system crash damaged your data, select "find lost data." If you cannot find the drive letter or access your drive at all, select "find lost drive."

4. Select the logical or physical hard drive that contains the lost data (a logical drive means a partition or virtual drive, and a physical drive means a whole drive.

5. Click on the green check to scan for data. Recover all data by saving on your alternatve drive. Depending on the health of the deleted hard drive, you can now reinstall your data.

6. If the drive has some sort of mechanical issue, you will not be able to do anything but send it in to a hard drive recovery service like those listed below.

Tips & Warnings

• Hard drives can crash or get erased for a number of reasons. It is an unfortunate fact of life. Taking precautions by backing up your important data periodically is the best way to insure against data loss.

Resources

• Hard Drive Recovery Group - Information and Recovery Service
• DTI - Hard Drive Recovery Service
• PC Inspector - Hard Drive Data Recovery Freeware