How to recover data when your hard drive crashes

First off, if you are reading this you were caught with your pants down, you had no backup solution and now you are in trouble. Every hard drive will eventually die, whether it is a week old or five years old there is no way to tell. That is why you need to have a backup solution that works so you are not reading this again a few years from now.

Well it is time to roll the dice and see what we can get, let’s begin the recovery process:

First start up the computer and hit the appropriate key to enter the BIOS (Del, F2, ESC, etc.). See if the BIOS recognizes the drive (if not, the hard drive's controller card is bad or the IDE or SATA cable may be bad). Next make sure that the hard drive is listed as the first boot device. Save changes and reboot the computer. At this point, if it still won’t boot go ahead and shut off the computer and open the computer tower. Put your hand on the hard drive and then turn on the power to check that the hard drive is spinning or making a clicking noise (if so, jump to the next paragraph). If it is completely dead with no click or vibration, remove the hard drive and throw it in your oven at 100 degrees F for a few minutes to warm it up a bit. The head and the disk may be stuck together making the disk unable to spin, the heat will make the disk grease more viscous allowing it to spin again. But if your drive is making a grinding noise (*Game Over*), time to spend tons of $$$ to have it opened up in a clean room and have the drive plates read.

Power off the computer, remove the hard drive, and hook it up as a secondary hard drive on another computer and then boot up Windows. It may take a few minutes longer than usual for the computer to boot up and will most likely start running checkdisk. Sometimes checkdisk fixes the problem, other times it will run for a few minutes and then stop. If checkdisk stops or could not fix the problem, reboot the computer and before checkdisk runs again press any key to bypass the check.

Now that Windows has started, go to My Computer to see if the hard drive is recognized and can be accessed. If it is not, you need to skip to the next paragraph below to continue. If it can be accessed, copy off the data off the drive (don’t forget to scan anything you recover with a virus scanner before opening any files). If it is recognized but cannot be accessed, run a good data recovery program and see what you can find. You may have to specify the format (FAT 32 or NTFS) in order to correctly read the drive.

If you have not recovered the data by now there is still hope, it is time to freeze the drive. Yes, I said freeze the drive. Place the hard drive in a ziplock bag and throw it in the freezer overnight and you may revive the drive back to life; if only for a while. This actually works because the space between the read head and the plates in the hard drive expand due heat over time. Just like a record player with the needle coming off the record it is no longer making contact. By freezing the drive it will shrink the gap temporarily back to the normal, hopefully longer enough for you to get your data back.

The next day take the drive out of the freezer and hook it up again as a secondary drive on the good computer and boot up Windows. Be careful where you place the bad drive because there will be some condensation that will drip off the drive when it warms back up (you don’t want to short out your motherboard). Bypass checkdisk if it comes up and cross your fingers. When Windows starts, check My Computer to see if the drive is recognized and can be accessed. Copy off the data as quick as possible if it can be accessed (don’t forget to scan anything you recover with a virus scanner before opening any files). If it is recognized but cannot be accessed, start up the data recovery program and get to work. Remember time is of the essence and this may be a one shot deal, you cannot continue freezing it and expect it to work.

Once you have either recovered the data or given up with no luck, you definitely should destroy any data on the drive by running a program like DBAN before throwing it in the trash. You can get it here.

Let me know if this was of help to you or if you have any experiences that you tell by posting a comment to this post. Thanks!