Dealing with Hard Drive Recovery

Blue screen of death and hard drive crash! Those are the hardest things to deal with when storing all of your data onto your personal computer. Many computer users today store all of their important data such as personal files, financial data, business records, pictures, videos and so much more on their computers. Once you store files onto a computer, those data will be stored in hardware referred to as the hard drive or disk drive.

The first thing that you need to consider on hard drive recovery is isolating for the problem. Once your hard drive crashes, it could only be two things; it could either be an operating system issue or a hardware issue. If it is a Windows operating system issue, try to check if the computer would still boot on safe mode. Safe mode can be accessed by pressing F8 upon starting up the computer. Now, once the computer boots to safe mode without problems, then that’s the chance to back up everything into any external storage device. If the computer fails to boot to safe mode, it’s possible that the operating system is already corrupted and cannot be restored. If the operating system is already corrupted then best way to fix it is by reformatting the whole drive.

If the problem is a hard drive failure, one way for hard drive recovery would be through the use of a hard drive enclosure. Hard drive enclosure is a device that enables user to connect an internal hard drive to other computers externally. Hard drive enclosures depend on the type and size of the hard drive that the computer has. Make sure to check the specification of the hard drive in order to get the correct hard drive enclosure. To back up using a hard drive enclosure, first, have the hard drive taken out from the computer. Check for the manual of your PC to see if the hard drive is easily accessible. If having trouble taking out the hard drive then you may always call for technical help. Once the hard drive is out, place it on the hard drive enclosure and connect the enclosure by either a USB or firewire cable onto another computer. After connection, the user will be able to access the information from the hard drive and transfer it into the computer for back up purposes.

If you are too busy to perform all of the troubleshooting steps provided, there is an option to bring the hard drive to a known data recovery company as well. Note that data recovery companies can charge as much $100 for hard drive recovery. Now to save you from all of these inconveniences and headache after hard drive crash, prevention would be the key. Always do regular data backups and have an external storage device ready to keep your files safe and always on the go.