How to Recover Data from Corrupted or Crashed Hard Drive on Windows.

Most of us have encountered a problem when your hard disk fails to boot and load. We feel anxious and nervous when this happens as our crucial data is at stake, so successful hard drive recovery is important to everyone. This article will guide you on recovering data from hard disk thereby saving your time and money. We will guide you step by step starting from easy methods to complicated and more reliable methods.

Every mechanical part has some life span after which they will fail. Since hard disk is an mechanical part, chances are it will corrupt any time, but good news is that there are number of recovery tools available in the market.

Connect the Hard Drive to Another Computer

If your PC is unable to boot and load OS then remove Hard Drive and connect it with another PC using USB to IDE/SATA adapter. This will connect Hard drive as an external USB drive and if it loads then you are in luck as you can copy the important files, photos or other data to another hard Drive.

If your hard disk loads then chances are some partition is corrupted and you will need to format the drive and after that it is as good as new.

Or other possible reason is that your computer BIOS is corrupted or its settings are changed which is not letting it load the drive.

Try to Copy the Data to Another Drive
If your drive gets connected to another computer successfully then check if all data is visible and copy it to another drive. This will not work if your drive is corrupted or dead, for that you will need recovery software. If you are able to copy data then format the drive, reinstall OS and it will work perfectly.

Download Data Recovery Software
If manually copying user data does not work then you will need to download a recovery software in another hard drive. Whatever is the case, do not write anything to the drive that you are trying to recover data from because this will overwrite files that are still hidden and can be restored. Following are some of the tools available for data recovery from hard disk:

i) Recuva:
It is the one of the best free hard drive recovery tools available in the market. Recuva is so powerful that it can recover data from formatted drives as well. If you are unable to find results from basic scan then don't worry, there is option for deep scan for uncovering deep buried data.  Additionally there is portable version of the applications as well, so if you do-not want full fledged version then you can opt for portable version of the app.

In an application first of all you have to choose the type of files you want to recover and then select recovery methods. So you can choose “Enable Deep Scan” if the quick scan doesn’t find the files you need to recover.

ii) PC Inspector File Recovery:
This tool is more powerful and can be used if you are unable to recover the files with Recuva. The application will show you three recovery options as follow:
-Recover Deleted Files – This will restore files that are deleted from drive but if the files are over-written, then this option will not work.
- Find Lost Data – This option is used to recover files after system crash. The scan will take some hours depending upon the size of your drive.
- Find Lost Drive – This option comes handy if your drive is not showing in “My Computer”.

iii) GetDataBack With zero cost option:
GetDataBack is way better than other available softwares. There are two different versions of the software available in the market, one for NTFS and the other for FAT files systems.
The app provides demo version to let you know which files it can recover, after that you can pay $79 for the NTFS version or $69 for the FAT version.

GetDataBack has highest success rates for capturing data than other available softwares. You will need to select the data lose scenario that you experienced on launching. Select "I don't know" if you are not certain. Then select drive for partitioning and then start the scan.

These are best tools available in the market for recovering lost data. If you are facing any problem let us know in the comments below and share this article to help others in recovering lost data. If you are MacOS user then wait for our next post, which will help in recovering data for MAC machines.