Sometimes, computers die. No matter how well you take care of them, no matter how new or old they are, there will be a day when their hard drives fail. When that happens, there are some things you can do to mitigate what will be one of the worst days of your life.
As much as we’d like to think otherwise, computers aren’t perfect. They might be the best thing mankind has ever invented, but they’re still prone to failure. And while it’s bad enough when your computer crashes or hangs up, it’s even worse when your hard drive dies on you completely.
I once lost a terabyte of data in 24 hours, and I had backups for everything – except the drive that held my Time Machine backup. That was on an external hard drive connected to my router; and when I logged into the router’s web interface to check on it one morning, my heart sank: “No Media.” It was gone; the router couldn’t even see it anymore. Panic ensued!
The best way to salvage data in an unrecoverable situation is to avoid getting into the situation in the first place. But that’s too obvious. The real question is, what can you do when you’re already in a situation where you’ve lost data and need it back?
It’s a worst nightmare to lose important data you have collected with so much work. It can be a part of your personal life or your work life, but losing it can be a headache. And even if you are aware of the importance of backing up regularly and take precautions in advance, sometimes it is just not enough to prevent an unrecoverable situation.
But don’t panic yet! There are still some ways to salvage that data in an unrecoverable situation. Here are several methods you can try:
– Using another computer to retrieve data from the damaged system
– Using another Operating System (OS)
– Using recovery software
Using another computer to retrieve data from the damaged system
In a situation where the system is dead and you cannot use any software to recover the data, you can still attempt to SALVAGE THE UNRECOVERABLE data by removing the hard drive from the computer and hook it up to another computer as a slave drive. This is a last resort recovery method but if it works, it will be worth the effort.
But before attempting this procedure, make sure that you have done all of the recommended methodologies to recover your data. If not, try those methods first. Also make sure that you have proper backups of all of your important data before attempting this procedure.
If you are able to remove your hard drive from your computer and connect it to another computer as a slave drive, then follow these steps:
1)Backup all of your important data on the slave hard drive immediately.
2)Format the slave hard drive as NTFS or FAT32 (depending on what file system was on it previously).
3)Run scandisk (chkdsk /r) on the slave hard drive.
- If any bad sectors were found on the hard drive, mark them so they will not be used again by running scandisk with surface scan enabled.
You’ve probably all had this happen to you before. You’re in a bind and you need some data off an inaccessible disk, or you need to recover data for a client; but the disk will not mount, will not even spin up, and when it does, it makes noises that tell you that your chances of recovering any data are slim. What do you do?
