How to Read a Broken Hard Drive
The hard drive is probably the most important piece of hardware you own. It contains all your data--every paper you have written, every digital picture, every music and video file, all your programs and games. When hard drives fail or get accidentally erased, even the prudent among us who back up data regularly get a sinking feeling. Luckily, there are ways to recover data. See the steps below to see if you can get some of your data back.
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Instructions
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Boot Windows using an alternate boot source such as a USB drive or an external hard drive. 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 start-up and select boot drive with working windows. Another option is to remove your drive and install it as a secondary drive on another computer.
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Download the freeware data-recovery program PC Inspector (link below) and install on the working drive.
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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."
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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.
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Click on the green check to scan for data. Recover all data by saving on your alternative drive. Depending on the health of the deleted hard drive, you can now reinstall your data.
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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. These services have sophisticated equipment for reading broken drives and extracting the data.
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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 ensure against data loss.
