harddriverecoverybasics.com

Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Geoff G.

Here's my solution to the quiz "How do you bring a hard drive back to life?"

In order to make the best use of a drive that may be failing, one could take the following steps:

1. Check the system to see if the drive will detect and boot up successfully. If so, skip to step 5 for backup/data retrieval procedures.
2. If the drive is not detecting properly on the system, check to see if the problem can be solved in the systems bios, by either manually reconfiguring the drive, or by autodetecting it. If this works, skip to 5.
3. If the drive simply will not work in that system, try putting it in another system that is working properly with a similar hard drive (the same drive type and/or size if possible). If the drive works in this system, but not in the original system, then perhaps the old system has more serious problems such as a bad IDE controller.
4. Try booting up on the drive. If it will not boot properly, try FDISK or some other partition viewer to see if it has valid partitions defined. If no valid partitions are defined, or if partitions are unformatted, then the data may be lost. Try redefining to the exact same partitions that were known to exist before the problems were encountered. If you have a working drive at this point, but no data, then it is likely that data is gone. If irreplaceable data was lost, you can try bringing the drive to a hardware shop for professional data retrieval.
5. If any of these attempts to revive the drive has succeeded, then immediately bring the system up and back up any important files to another drive or to removable media. Run scandisk and/or any other drive checking utilities. If serious problems are found with the drive, or if you have suspicion that the drive will continue having more problems like this, then prepare to replace the drive. While you still have a working system, make a complete backup if possible. Perhaps the entire drive image can still be retrieved and copied onto the new drive, and no system re-install will be necessary.

Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Chris Heizmann

I. If the drive works intermittently and won't boot to Windows:

1) Create a boot disk on a different machine if available (format c: /s). 2) Use the boot disk to start the machine in DOS. 3) Switch to drive c:\. 4) Copy all data files to floppy (more than one disk will be needed).

II. If the drive does not work at all.

• 1) Open up the case.
• 2) Locate and remove the Hard Disk Drive.
• 3) Tap on the side of the hard drive with a screwdriver a few times (not too hard).
• 4) Re-install the drive and start the PC.
• 5) If the PC boots to Windows, backup all data files via MSbackup. 6) If the PC won't boot to Windows, follow the above instructions.