Nothing is worse than when your hard drive fails and you lose tons of information, especially when it is expensive information like software or sensitive business information. This is annoying to anyone who uses their computer on a daily basis. I want to talk a little bit about hard drive failure and what you can do to recover your lost data. I am not going to get too into detail here but rather I would like to share what I know basically about the two types of hard drive failure.
Sometimes some data on your hard drive can become corrupted or damaged in some way. You could have maybe had a virus or worm get into your system or any number of things. The result is that your computer either no longer boots up or is having difficulty booting up. This is the lesser of the two evils when it comes to hard drive failure. There are data recovery software solutions readily available to you online. All you need to do is search and you are pretty much good to go. Usually damaged data on the hard drive has something to do with your partitioning tables or boot record and or perhaps missing data from the root directory.
The software that's out there available now is not really that expensive at all and you should probably find one and buy it for safe keeping. Now the real problem is the other type of hard drive failure. The worse of the two evils is a physically damaged hard drive. A hard drive spins don't forget and all moving parts wear and break eventually. So it should be no surprise if you suddenly realize that your hard drive just died on you. This is a little bit more complicated to render and recovering your data in this situation requires a bit of prudence.
The first thing to bear in mind is that when your hard drive is physically damaged you must avoid even booting up the system. This is difficult because as you try to install a new operating system on a new drive, it will try to write to the files on the old drive. People use disk imaging software to help put a system in place to recover lost data from hard drives. The disk imaging software takes an image of your hard drive and stores it on to a disk. You can later access that disk to write to the new drive.
I want to emphasize that if the part of the hard drive that is damaged contains your operation system then you want to avoid writing to the old drive. So, you need to disconnect the current boot drive and install another one. Just put the old hard drive in an external case and connect it via USB. This will allow you to run the data recovery software from the new hard drive while avoiding writing to the old one.
You should probably look for yourself to see what the best disk imaging software is for your budget but I like Get Data Back quite a bit. It has worked for me whenever I needed it too and that's all I can ask. You never know, you might even damage somehow your external hard drive that you use for back up so it's definitely worth it in the long run to cover yourself. Laptop data recovery is yet again another story altogether. With a laptop you may need to disable the IDE controller which basically allows the mother board to access the hard drive. Disabling the IDE controller might be a simple fix but not always. Sometimes it will disable the CD drive which will make it impossible to load the new operating system.
You can get around that one by creating a bootable CD with something like BartPE and using that to write to your new hard drive. There's actually a lot more to learn about hard drive data recovery but you have the basics here.
