Tips to help you recover files from a dead hard drive

How to recover files from a dead hard drive

Hard drives, like all electronic and mechanical devices, can die for many reasons. Unless you are a hardware engineer or a geek obsessed with technology, you probably care about how to recover your valuable files, instead of finding out the exact cause of the destruction of your hard drive. That is exactly what this guide will help you with. We will guide you through a hypothetical recovery scenario of a dead hard drive and we will show you in detail what you must do.

Step 1: Connect the dead hard drive (Optional)

If you have two hard drives in your laptop or computer, maybe one for your operating system and one for your files, you can skip this step. However, if the dead hard drive contains your operating system or was given to you by a friend or relative, you must connect it to the computer.

Owners of desktop computers can open the case and connect the damaged hard drive with a SATA cable, which is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters with mass storage devices. You can buy a SATA cable on the Internet or at your local hardware store. One end of the cable goes to the hard drive and the other goes to the motherboard. There's really no way to connect it wrong, so do not worry.

Owners of laptops can purchase an external USB cradle designed to accept all types of commonly used hard drives. The advantage of a base like this is its convenience. The hard drive simply gets inside and the base itself connects to your laptop through a normal USB cable.

Step 2: Evaluate the damage

With the failed disk connected to a running computer, you have everything you need to assess the extent of the damage. In some cases, the hard drive will appear as another storage device and you will be able to transfer all the files from it.

That could happen if it is not the hard disk that is defective, but the operating system installed on it. Unfortunately, most cases of data recovery are not so simple. The contents of the hard drive are often visible, but Windows or Mac OS X can not transfer data from it. Worse still, the disk may seem empty. What you need, then, is a data recovery software solution designed to address situations like this.

Step 3: Recover files from the dead hard drive with Disk Drill

When all else fails, Disk Drill comes to the rescue. In the great sea of programs and applications of file recovery, Disk Drill stands out with its highly polished user interface that allows anyone to recover files from a dead disk or SD card or simply from any other storage device in just a few minutes .

In fact, it only takes a few seconds to tell Disk Drill what to do, followed by a brief wait while the program applies its advanced data recovery algorithms to restore more than 200 types of files, allowing you to select what you want to recover and what you do not need.