These days, recovering data from a corrupted or crashed hard drive is not an impossible task. In this article, we tell you a few ways that can help you recover data from a bad hard drive.
When there is a lot of important data needed on the run, an external hard drive is the best option. You can use it whenever and wherever your data requirements arise. An external hard drive also serves as a backup device for you, in case your system crashes or is under a virus attack. However, it becomes essential to know how to use an external hard drive properly because, if it gets corrupt or crashes for some reason, it becomes all the more necessary to recover the data stored in it.
How to Recover Data From an External Hard Drive
There are high chances that your external hard drive is still working mechanically, in spite of having crashed. To check that, first connect the external hard drive to the system. There could be a possibility that the index of data may have been lost. If your disk drive is getting power supply, considering the fact that it is connected to its own power device, check if the system is recognizing the disk. If yes, check for the data contents.
If the data is not retrievable, then do NOT format your external hard drive. In this case, data recovery software is one of the tangible ways of recovering data. However, if the disk drive is not getting powered up by its own power supply, try inserting it into your system (like other disk drives). If the disk is recognized, then congratulations! All your data is intact. What you would need to do is buy a new power supply for your external hard drive data. If even after inserting the drive into your system, the disk is not readable, then you need to opt for lab data recovery.
Software Data Recovery
Software data recovery becomes necessary in case of logical failures of hard drives. More so, when the master file table (MFT) of Windows system has been corrupted, with the index pointing to your still intact data gets deleted or missing. This is a peculiar case where, after connecting the disk to your system, your system might show that your disk contains data, but the data remains unreadable due to the missing index. In that case, you would require another hard disk drive with more capacity than your current disk drive, which has software like GetDataBack, Pareto Logic Data Recovery or Easy Recovery. The installation of these software might cost you between $49.95 and $199.
Using these software, one can run a file search on the kind of files to be retrieved. If the disk storage capacity is high, the data recovery process might take days for searching and retrieving lost data. And all this depends on correctness of the master file table. Not that the data will not be retrievable otherwise, but the data will be stored as individual files, without a proper folder structure.
Lab Data Recovery
This method of recovering external hard drive data is adopted when your hard drive does not read, even after it is inserted into the system. That is, it is mechanically not functional and there is a spinning or clicking sound heard. In that case, you can get in touch with Ontrack Data Recovery Services, to recover data from any kind of interface (IDE, EIDE, SATA, SCSI, SAS, and Fiber Channel). Both logical failure (lost partition or accidental reformatting) and mechanical failure (like head crashes and motor failure) can be sorted out using this lab data recovery method. These external hard drive data recovery techniques should be carried out in a dust free environment. These hard drives are imaged, where a copy of the disk is made using this method of recovering data, from a crashed external hard drive.
Many a time, a hard disk drive may get corrupted, or crash, for myriad reasons, like power fluctuations, overwriting, malicious software, and physical damages. By adopting the above techniques, your data can be retrieved, and will be available at your convenience.