How to Recover Hard Drive Data

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Richard Goms here in Salt Lake City, Utah. We are talking about hard drive basics. And today I'm going to talk to you about how to recover hard drive data. There are many different programs out there both on the internet and in the stores that will recover hard drive data to some extent. If it's just a small problem with the hard drive most programs will recover whatever files data information is on your hard drive. If it's something more extensive such as a hard drive being melted in a fire, or damaged due to some kind of violent act on the computer or the hard drive. That requires a little different recover procedure. There are companies that offer recovery of hard drive data where the hard drive is no longer accessible by normal means. And you have to pay a little bit more to get it recovered but depending on how important that data is it's sometimes worth it to get that done. Coming to mind the last shuttle crash where the shuttle burned up in the atmosphere they were able to recover the hard drive and recover, even though the hard drive was completely melted, they were able to pull the disks, the platters out of the hard drive and recover a lot of information off of those platters. Now I want to show you how to recover data from a hard drive that's not in too bad a shape using fix it utilities that are available either on the internet or in the stores. Ok first of all if the hard drive could not be booted from, you need to put the fix it disk in the CD rom drive and then boot from the CD rom drive. In this case it comes up with this menu. Partitioning recovery command or rescue disk wizard. Lets go to the rescue disk wizard other then partitioning we can either do recovery or we can fix the boot. If you can not boot from the hard drive you may want to try to fix the boot. Before anything else and see if that solves the problem. If that doesn't solve the problem if you still can't boot up your computer from a hard drive then we would go to the recovery commander option. As you see it's analyzing the system looking for the operating system and what is available, what is working. It shows what's on in this case drive zero which is C drive and drive one which is a D drive in this case. Ok so let's select the C drive assuming the C drive is can not be booted from and click next. After you tried to fix the boot and if that wasn't the problem you can do a restore, the functionality of the system and that tries to fix any corrupted operating system files. You can try that next, if that still doesn't work then you can try to copy off any files, folders that are important to you so that they don't get destroyed if you take the disk drive to a shop to have it looked at. So we select view, edit or copy file folders, if there's no other solution to the problem you may want to back up your folders and files that you don't want to lose when you take your hard drive in to be looked at. So we would select in this case backup the content of the folders, we could then in our source, which is your hard drive you would select wherever the source folder is that you want a copy information from or you could even browse and select the specific folder and then we can select our destination. Like say we want to do it to the D drive so then what this is going to do when you click next is it's going to copy everything from your source folder over to your destination drive. Now when you are ready to restore those files from lets say your D drive in this case back to the new C drive you can click restore here, go next, and then you select your D drive and you can go down to whatever folder you want, you would put your information in and then you can select where on your C drive you want to put that."