How To Recover Data From A crashed Laptop Or Computer hard Drive

For a tech savvy individual, you already know that hard drive failures are inevitable. Possibilities are that sooner or later it will happen to you or to someone you know.  The good news is that there are lots of great recovery tools and methods that can be used to recover your lost data.

Connect the Drive to Another Computer
To start work on the crashed hard drive, remove it from the current laptop or computer and connect it to another laptop or computer as a secondary drive.  The best way to do this is to use a USB to IDE/SATA adapter, but  If you don’t have one available then you can connect the drive to another laptop or computer internally as a secondary drive.  If you decide to use this option, please ensure that the machine detects the drive in the BIOS or you won’t be able to access it once the laptop or computer starts up.

Try Copying the Data to Another Drive
After you might have succeed in connecting the drive to another laptop or computer either internally or with a USB adapter, check to see if you can browse the contents of the hard drive.  If you can, try copying the data that you would like to recover from the crashed laptop or computer.  There is a huge chance or possibility that only the operating system is corrupt and the user data is still OK.

Try Using a Data Recovery Software
If you can’t manually copy the user data from the crashed hard drive, then you can try to recover it using data recovery software.  Whatever you do, do not install the recovery software on to the drive that you are trying to recover data from. Doing so could actually overwrite files that you want to restore. One of the best but yet free hard drive recovery tool that I normally use is Recuva.

Recuva is a free hard drive recovery tool from Piriform (the makers of CCleaner) and is one of the best free PC data recovery tools available.  Even if the drive has been formatted, Recuva can scan the hard drive and recover files. If the basic scan fails, there is also a deep scan to discover more deeply-buried results.  There is also a portable version if you don’t want to install the full version.

When you launch Recuva, you will be presented with a wizard that will guide you through the process of restoring your files.  First you will choose the type of file you need to recover, then the location, and then start the scan or choose “Enable Deep Scan” if the quick scan doesn’t find the files you need to recover.

Another very good hard drive recovery tool is the PC Inspector File Recovery. Though this recovery software has been around for quite sometime, it’s still a decent recovery tool and can be used if you are unable to recover the files you need with Recuva.