Hard Disk Recovery

What do you do when your hard drive fails? I mean really fails? I'm talking about the dreaded "my system won't even boot up anymore and safe-mode and other recovery options aren't working?" Tim G. asked that question (and sorry, Tim, that it took me a week to respond) and also wants to know if there is any way to recover the data from that drive, assuming that bringing it back to working condition is out of the question.

First, do make sure that you have tried the basic recovery steps first. In Windows XP or Vista, you'll want to try to boot into safe mode (hit F8 just before you see the Windows logo which is usually right after you see the name of the manufacturer, such as Dell, or the boot information, such as the memory check). If the system is failing during the loading of Windows, then you'll probably automatically get this boot menu saying that Windows failed to start successfully the last time. Try Safe Mode With Command Prompt.

If you can successfully boot into safe mode and see a basic black screen or window with a command line prompt, type the following:

chkdsk /f
exit

Then, press control-alt-delete and choose shutdown following by the reboot or restart option. The computer will reboot and attempt to fix any bad files on the disk. The length of this process could be minutes or hours depending on the size of the drive, the speed of the computer, and the number of problems being fixed.

If you can't get into safe mode, then boot from the Windows XP or Vista installation CD/DVD. Choose the recovery console and when you get in, then run the commands above (when you type exit, the system will reboot automatically). When it reboots, don't boot to the CD but rather wait to see if Windows actually loads.

If none of this works, we may need more drastic measures.

If you're using a Macintosh running OS X, then boot the OS X CD/DVD and instead of installing the system, choose the Utilities menu (after the language selection) and select Disk Utility. Highlight the drive you're trying to repair and click the repair button.

Whether using a Mac or PC, notebook or desktop computer, if you still aren't left with a bootable system, one last thing you can try yourself would be to pull out the hard drive and try it on another computer. Since the procedure to remove a hard drive will vary significantly from Mac to PC and even between various notebooks and desktops from the same manufacturer, I'll just say that if you aren't comfortable doing this, have a techie friend help you at this point!

It used to be that you had to remove the hard drive and put it into another similar computer. Fortunately, there are easier ways now. One of the products that I use for this very situation is from NewerTech called the USB Universal Drive Adapter. The great thing about this device is that it will take any IDE drive, such as those used in desktop computers, laptop IDE drive, such as those used in both Mac and PC notebooks, or SATA drive, such as those used in laptops and desktops alike and turn it into an external USB device. This means that you don't have to pop that drive into another laptop or desktop computer just to try to recover data off of it. This device from NewerTech (and there are other competing brands out there as well that do essentially the same thing) works with Windows XP, Vista, and Macintosh computers and most likely won't require any additional drivers to be installed on the host computer.

If the drive works--this won't bring it back from the dead if it doesn't even power on or if someone drove a truck over it--this will very likely be able to get your data off of the disk. Since you're booting up the host computer (the computer that works which you will use to extract the data) before hooking up the USB cable, you'll only be reading from the bad disk, not trying to boot from it. Since your system won't even boot, it is very likely that there are problems with the system files themselves. The process described here avoids all of that and mounts your drive as a secondary device on your host system. In Windows, this means that it will show up as drive D, E, F, or some other letter after your other hard drive and CD/DVDs on the system. On a Mac, this means that it will show up as another drive on the desktop.

At this point, you have to realize that the goal of getting the drive working again is probably not going to be met. Instead, what you really want to do is recover your important data. Browse the mounted drive you are trying to recover and find the files and programs of which you do not have current backups. On a PC, personal data is usually in "x:\documents and settings\" or "x:\users" (where x:\ is the drive you are trying to recover). On a Mac, the personal data will be inside of /Users on the disk in question. Simply copy the files you want (and, of course, its better to over-copy at this point than to under-copy and miss something important) to the working hard drive or to a writable CD, DVD, or USB Key. If you have a iPod with a hard drive in it and another available USB port, this can be used a great temporary backup device as well.

What can't you back up? In Windows, its nearly impossible to back up the applications themselves. That's because the application is probably stored in an obvious folder somewhere under "x:\program files." Unfortunately, the installer also puts files into x:\windows, x:\windows\system32 and also makes numerous changes to the registry. If you regularly backed up the system from within the booted Windows volume, these backups probably contain the registry and other files needed to restore the applications. But, since you've read this far, its too late to back up all of that. What you should do instead is reinstall Windows from scratch on a new hard drive on the computer whose drive you just recovered, reinstall the applications, and then restore your data.

With a Mac, you may be able to recover some of the applications because many are self contained or auto-repair themselves after being moved or copied to new locations. However, for others, you may be forced into rerunning the installation.

When your data is backed up, you could always try formatting the drive from the working system and starting over. However, if you got this far, chances are that the drive isn't very reliable and you're taking your chances of the problem reoccurring. The best bet would be to replace the drive, reinstall Windows or MacOS, reinstall your applications, and restore the data. If you don't have a spare computer on which to do the recovery, you can pull the bad hard drive out, put in a replacement drive, and rebuild the system before trying to recover the data from the bad hard drive on the same system.

It is also possible that the drive itself isn't the problem. If other drives fail on the same computer, you may find that it is the computer itself that is at fault. Unfortunately, for most home computers and notebooks, the drive controller is part of the motherboard and this may not be an easy fix for you. It may be time to find a new computer. However, keep the old hard drive since there may actually be nothing wrong with it (and you can still try to recover the data from the new computer when it arrives).

Finally, count your blessings. After installing a new hard drive and even if you recover every single bit of data that you had and reinstall every application that you remember you were using, your system will still most likely appear to be much faster and have more space available. Somehow, after months or years, all of those programs that were installed, uninstalled, upgraded, reinstalled, and so on, cluttered the system and gradually slowed things down and filled up extra hard drive space. Plus, there are probably several things you had on there that you didn't need, didn't want, and didn't even know you had and therefore, you won't even miss. Its not much, but sometimes you need to look on the good side!

Thanks, Tim for the question and I hope this helps you out.