Hard Drive Failure - What Happens next?
If you have ever lost a vital file due to a hard drive crash, you know the agony. That last project you worked on so hard, the spreadsheet which has be in your boss’ inbox in the morning, or those pictures of Grandmother taken at her 102nd birthday — all gone in a flash, courtesy of a drive failure. But those frightful looking messages are not always the final word. Before you’re taking a sledge hammer to your drive, try these hard drive recovery steps.
The 1st step is to ascertain if it really is drive failure you are experiencing.
Did you install any new hardware since your last successful boot-up? If this is so unplug those devices and attempt to re-boot.
No go? OK, if you are running Windows, try and start up in Safe Mode. Reboot your Computer , and hit the F8 key when the PC starts up. Select the choice to go into Safe Mode. If you can get to the Windows’ login-screen, you are likely having a software problem, not drive failure. You can do a re-install of Windows to get to your files ( see Recovery Console ) or you can use Windows’ System Revive feature to get your Computer running again. In a few cases a broken master boot record or partition table can render a disk unbootable, but all of the info is still intact.
See Recover Deleted Files for a tool to help with that comparatively easy fix job. In one particular case, my drive got absolutely mucked up and nothing seemed to work but they got my key files sorted out. I was sure that all of the information was lost, but they did the job for me.
