External Hard Drive Data Recovery
by Chris Lees
There are really just two different kinds of hard drive failure. The first kind is when the data on the hard drive is damaged or corrupted and the other kind is when the hard drive itself is physically damaged. Usually when it is the data on the hard drive that has been corrupted it might be related to the partition table or root directory data missing. It could also be a damaged boot record causing issues. This type of data recovery situation is a bit less complicated than recovering data from a physically damaged hard drive.
There are software solutions for information or data recovery easily available online but if your hard drive is physically damaged then you need to be careful even just booting the computer up. You’ve got to be really careful about not even accidentally trying to write to the old hard drive if it’s physically damaged. There is disk imaging software that will take an image of your disk which you can access later in case of hard drive failure. One such brand that I have heard great things about is Get Data Back.
If the drive that is damaged is the drive that contains the operating system you must avoid booting that drive if possible in order to avoid further damage. So you would need to disconnect the old boot drive and install a new one if working on a desktop system. Put the old hard drive in an external cab and reconnect it by way of USB. Now you can run the data recovery software (disk imaging) from the brand new hard drive and avoid the need to write to the old drive. There’s just one thing you have to remember to do when installing the operating system on the new drive, and that is you must disconnect the boot partition. Otherwise it will try to write to the old hard drive in the temporary files.
Now when it comes to laptop hard drive failure it can be a little trickier. While it is entirely possible to install windows on your external hard drive, the problem of temporary files writing to the old and damaged hard drive still exists. You can try disabling the IDE controller but that might not always work, then again it might work fine. It depends. The IDE controller allows the mother board to access the hard drive at the system bios level. Well, sometimes when you disable the IDE controller it in effect disables more than you want it to. For example it could also disable the CD drive which would inhibit the transfer of files enabling you to install the operating system.
You can get around this by booting from a CD that you create with the necessary software already included rather than try to boot from the hard drive. You can create a bootable CD with software such as BartPE or other popular software. It bundles together all kinds of hard drive data recovery apps with other windows components.
So while there are workarounds to be found here and there the best thing to do is to have a back up already in place. Don’t take any risks with your information. You could lose thousands of dollars worth of software and data when your hard drive goes. Software corruption is much more manageable for regular users than actual hard disk damage. You should have no problems finding suitable software for data recovery by doing just simple searches online. The key is to be prepared now if you are not already. My suggestion is that everyone should learn a thing or two about data recovery as you will most likely encounter a situation where you will be called upon to exercise those skills…unfortunately!
Data recovery services are quite expensive so unless you are willing to fork over up to a grand or so for services, you would be better off taking the time to learn a few things about data recovery.
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