Hard drive crash?

Question

If your hard drive crashes and the machine does not boot up is there any way to retrieve information from that hard drive? And when making it a slave is not an option.
Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming you are getting a BSOD (Blue Srceen Of Death).



Download a live Linux iso (knoppix is very good) and burn to cd/dvd and run it.





Go into you BIOS, (usually by pressing delete key on pc startup) and change first boot device to cdrom drive, then insert your live cd and restart the computer, Linux will now load you to the desktop enviroment and from there look in the menu for backup software or just copy all your files from your xp installation or what ever to a usb stick/empy partion or if you have 2 cd/dvd drives burn to disc.



~some Linux CD/DVDs have tools to solve problems like damaged boor loaders and lots of other problems.~



~If you cant get into BIOS you must clear it, by shorting the pins on the motherboard, check your manual.~

Answer 2

If the pickup inside the hard drive has touched the disk, the data in that area is lost for good as there is physical damage in that area. There are companies that recover data from drives such as this - again only that which is recoverable (generally very expensive option).



Drives that crash in this way generally are bumped or have run for an exessive amount of time (difficult to say how long- but I have had drives running continuously for close to 5 years without trouble and again those that have run 3 years and will not boot up again)



Very often drive crashes are actually a corruption of the operating system and these with a bit of care will allow you to retrieve your data, but often not the software that you had loaded (corrupt registry)

Answer 3

Maybe. Depends on how badly damaged it is.



Boot from a live/boot CD/disk and try to access the crashed disk. Copy the data out of it as soon as you can.

Answer 4

It depends on exactly what's wrong with the drive. Worst case, there are hard drive data retrieval services you can ship the hard drive to. They are expensive, but they can work miracles.

Answer 5

It depends how you call it as crash



If the HDD is good only OS crashed it can be recovered bvy connecting it extetrnal or in Slave



If the clusters of HDD gone bad...only some chances to retrive.