How to Recover Data from a Crashed Hard Drive
If you are a tech, then you probably know that hard drive failures are inevitable. Chances are that sooner or later it will happen to someone you support or possibly even you. Even with a successful backup, you still may not have files that were created or modified after the last backup. Even worse is when you don’t have a backup at all. There is still hope however. I would like to show you how you can use a simple freeware utility to recover files even when your hard drive will not boot.
The first thing you want to do is to remove the problematic drive from the computer and install it as a secondary drive in another computer that has Windows installed. Make sure you enable the secondary hard drive controller in the bios and that it is detecting the drive in bios.
After you have set up the secondary drive, boot into Windows and download PC Inspector File Recovery. Whatever you do, do not install this on to the drive that you are trying to recover. Doing so could actually overwrite files that you want to restore. Install this on the primary drive that you are booting from.
Open PC Inspector File Recovery and choose your language. After you choose your language, you will be presented with a welcome screen giving you three options.
The first option is “Recover Deleted Files”. This allows you to restore files that have been permanently deleted from the drive. This will only work if the deleted file has not already been overwritten.
The second option is “Find Lost Data”. This allows you to recover data that has been lost due to a system crash. If you choose this option, you will be asked for the “start cluster” and “end cluster”. Leave the default settings to scan the whole drive. The scan could take a couple of hours depending on how large your drive is.
The third option is “Find Lost Drive”. Use this option if your drive letter is not showing up in Windows Explorer or My Computer. It will attempt to connect to the drive and if successful, allow you to browse the data.
If you do not have a secondary computer to attach the drive to then you will probably want to check out the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.
UBCD for Windows allows you to boot into Windows from a CD and run diagnostic utilities on your problematic drive. PC Inspector File Recovery is one of the utilities that come bundled with UBCD for Windows so you can run it right from the CD. You will need a computer with Windows XP and possibly a Windows XP installation CD to create the UBCD for Windows.
Another option is to try a very successful method I discussed in the previous article titled Put Your Hard Drive In The Freezer To Recover Data.
If none of these options work or if the drive will not spin up at all, then you will probably need to send the drive off to a data recovery service. One popular service is Ontrack Data Recovery service but I would highly recommend shopping around before making a decision.
If you have any experience in this area or know of some other great apps for recovering data please feel free to share.
Other Posts You Might Like:
- Put Your Hard Drive in the Freezer to Recover Data
- How to Permanently Wipe All Data from a Hard Drive
- How to Automatically Back Up Your Hard Drive
- How to Check the Speed of a USB Flash Drive
- How to Restore Deleted Files After Emptying the Recycle Bin
October 3rd, 2006 at 3:09 pm
After trying everything else but before sending your hard drive to the professionals you can try swapping the circuit board on the hard drive with one from a working IDENTICAL hard drive (apart from brand, family and size make sure firmware matches as well). This has worked twice for me so far.
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April 30th, 2007 at 5:33 am
I have a hard drive that crashed, and it have two (2) partition. I can read the second partition, but not the first one. What can i do in this case?
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April 30th, 2007 at 5:35 am
What software can i use to recover data from bad clusters in a hard drive?
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April 30th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Hey Vinnie,
If the software in the article above does not work then I would highly recommend trying this method. http://www.caseytech.com/put-your-hard-drive-in-the-freezer-to-recover-data/ This method has proven to be successful for many people with unreadable hard drives. If that doesn’t work then you might have to consider sending it off to a data recovery service.
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June 2nd, 2007 at 7:38 pm
an easier way without pulling the harddrive, is to run a live linux, my favorite is knoppix, you can run from the cd, (of course first setting your boot options in BOIS to cdrom) then you can pull the data to a second installed burner or if the computer is networked use samba to transfer the information off of the bad drive. once i have the info that is salvageable off, it’s time to test and see if the drive is worthy of saving or time to replace.
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June 10th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
I only plug IDE cables to a PC with damaged mother or processor or something like that or recovery of deleted. 2 foot long cables helps.
Rlinux freeware works for recovery of deleted recycle bin but I can take a few hours.
http://www.findapp.com/fmgmt/Pdetails.aspx?PID=4590
List of live CDs. Sometimes UBCD wont boot and Knoppix, Slax will or Ubuntu. I cant depend one just one so I have about 7 iso burned.
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
With Linux live I recover the files to a thumb drive.
Regwizz on UBCD is handy for restore points.
If I know its really going Ill try the freezer trick and getting PC inspector. Thanks.
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June 10th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Oh someone post a link on making a UBCD for someone that has a ealy XP disk without SP1. It was a real pain and I want to upgrade UDCD new version.
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June 17th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
I WAS HOPING THAT YOU MAY BE ABLE TO TELL ME IF THERE IS A WEB SIGHT I CAN GO TO . THAT WILL LET ME DOWN LOAD SOAFT WARE TO RECOVER INFOMATION FROM A HARD DRIVE THAT HAS CRASHED ? AS WELL AS ANY OTHER SOAFT WARE THAT MAY BE USE FULL FOR A PERSON THAT IS TEACHING HIS SELF HOW TO FIX COMPUTERS ! THANK YOU TONY
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August 6th, 2007 at 9:28 am
I also recommend using SpinRite instead of PC Inspector. I’ve used both and while SpinRite takes longer, it’s MUCH more thorough and has restored dead hard drives that PC Inspector couldn’t even read. Also, SpinRite can correct clusters identified as “bad” when they truly aren’t, resulting in a drive that operates as fast as when it was new; this is critically important for newer, larger drives which have much more frequently labeled “bad” clusters (even though the drives automatically compensate for them in firmware). Trust me, having BOTH applications is very worthwhile.
PS SpinRite has an interesting copyright…it’s free to distribute copies to colleagues based on the assumption that those receiving the copies will find it useful and will purchase a license which, of course, is pretty inexpensive.
PPS Steve Gibson (of Steve Gibson Research, grc.com) is the brilliant mind behind SpinRite. I rank him right up there with Mark R. of Sysinternals.
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November 6th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
This may sound strange…but it worked for me just now and I was able to recover all my data before the drive crashed again.
I had tried putting it in the freezer, but it was 120 GB drive…so it would heat up and crash before I was able to complete the copying process.
I put the drive in the freezer then after hooking the drive back up I took a small freezer bag and filled it with ice. I placed the small freezer bag in a large freezer bag and then placed the problematic drive in the large freezer bag against the bagged ice while I copied over all my data.
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October 25th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
trojan horse in your free program
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September 12th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Some people have mentioned using Knoppix to recover data from a crashed hard drive. I just got done recovering the data from my bosses hard drive ysing an Ubuntu LiveCD.
Directions on how to do that are
here
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April 14th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
please i need help on my crashed hard drive installed with xpsp2,it was updating and was shutting down when i mistakenly pushed the power button,since then my laptop refused to boot,it keeps on recycling on your best known configuration that worked screen etc.so i bought an external sata drive case and fix the HDD on it and plugged it on another laptop but i was making a clicking noise and was not recognizing or reading.please am so confused cos i have a whole lots of stuffs on my laptop.
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April 30th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
hey i have problem on my hardrive, he cannot detect on bios, i can try another pc, cannot detect, how to recover my file
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June 10th, 2010 at 2:08 am
Guys i think you should also learn to have backups just for security purposes.I normally backup online with safecopy backup and here everything including the costs are fine and more to that now they give a free unlimited 5GB trial version.I love my laptop but this does not stop me form backing up online just to avoid my data from getting lost incase my hard drive crashes.
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September 7th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Great, this fixed our problem on the job! I can’t wait to browse more =D
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July 28th, 2011 at 11:22 am
Would this work if the hard drive crashed is “unreadable”? I took it to some one to repair it, they-re installing a new drive but they say the contents of the old one are unsccessible as the drive won’t read
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September 17th, 2011 at 10:20 pm
“make sure that is detecting the drive in bios? If its a bad drive it wont be detected in BIOS. WTF? if bios detects the drive then you are good……this post is worthless…fuking douche
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Casey Reply:
September 19th, 2011 at 8:28 am
Rob,
Not all hard drive failures result in a completely dead drive. Most of the time they will still show up in the bios but will require data recovery methods similar to the ones above because you cannot boot from them. Trust me, as someone who has worked in the IT industry for over 15 years, I have been able to recover data from drive failures countless times following steps similar to the ones in this post.
-Casey
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December 15th, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Ok heres one for everyone. I can read the drive with another computer can even see partition and see the other drive. One I cant read is F:\ the G:\ is accesible and can be read. Whenever I load via 2.5 hd reader I get a message saying it wants to format the drive which I dont want to do. Now using pc inspector aint worked. Now from what i can see is I format the drive and then use pc inspector to recover the lost folder (pictures) thats all my friend really wants saved. But is there not a program I can use to access this drive. With pc inspector Ive managed to find all the old deleted files but this is not what I need I need to access the current folder and get its files. Any ideas????
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December 23rd, 2011 at 6:43 am
My laptop died on me this week, and after running the PSA and everything, the Dell support told me that it’s a HDD failure. Since they are going to replace a new one for me, and I’m given 15 days to try to backup that faulty HDD, I’ll give everything a try.
Oh jeez, this will suck big time if I can’t retrieve my dog’s puppy photos…
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