Software to recover data from a broken hard drive

Written by. Arthur Cole. Approved by. Brett Johnson. Steps on How to Recover Deleted Files from Dead Hard Drive Step 1: Connect your dead hard drive to a PC If you have two hard drives in your laptop or computer — perhaps one for your operating system and one for your files — you can safely skip this step. Step 2: Assessing the Damage With the malfunctioning disk connected to a working computer, you have everything you need to evaluate the scope of the damage.

Free Download. How do you fix a hard drive that won't boot? How can I recover data from a dead external hard drive? Can I recover data from hard disk which is not detecting? Can I move my old hard drive to a new computer? What are the signs of HDD failure? Read full bio. Related Articles December 10, And usually, all volumes on the disk will show as "At Risk" status. Step 2. If the "Healthy At Risk " status is still displayed, there may be a disk failure. Back up data and replace disk as soon as possible.

The "uninitialized" state occurs when the disk does not have a valid signature or virus corruption. Step 1. Connect the hard disk to other computers to see if it is normal. If it is still uninitialized, you can initialize it first. Right-click the disk and click "Initialize Disk".

The disk status is temporarily changed to "initializing" and then to "Online" status. Open "Disk Management", right-click the missing disk, and then click "Reactivate Disk". If there are multiple missing disks, Disk Management will attempt to reactivate all of them.

When the dynamic disk is transferred from another computer to the local computer, the "Foreign" status is displayed. The "Foreign" status is also displayed when a computer running Windows XP Home Edition is configured to pass dual boot mode of another operating system using dynamic disks. Importing a Foreign disk would solve it. An "unreadable" state occurs when a basic or dynamic disk is inaccessible.

You can solve this error by following the steps below:. In the Device Manager, double-click the device where there is usually a yellow triangle exclamation icon beside it and open the driver Properties window. If your MBR disk is damaged, you certainly cannot boot into Windows.

How to repair the damaged MBR? Here we'll provide a safe and reliable procedure to help you. Follow the step-by-step instructions to rebuild MBR.

When your external hard drive fails, you can try the solutions below to fix it. If you can see obvious damage, such as strange sounds, obvious cracks, or a broken printed circuit board, send the HDD to a specialist in time. The following methods are more suitable for repairing non-physical damage. If the disk has bad sectors or internal errors, the hard disk can corrupt very easily. If command line is not your ideal choice, you can apply this command-line alternative tool - EaseUS CleanGenius.

Disk Drill also includes helpful hard drive management utilities that cover everything from data backup to hard drive health monitoring. Even though Disk Drill is the tool of choice for many IT professionals, it still manages to be just as accessible and easy to use as data recovery tools aimed at complete beginners.

This open source data recovery software can help you recover lost partitions and make non-booting disks bootable again. That said, if you are comfortable with the command line environment, TestDisk is a fantastic, lightweight alternative to graphical external hard drive recovery tools.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery can recover deleted data from Internal and external hard drives, help you retrieve lost data from inaccessible partitions, and do all of this in just a few minutes and with 1 GB of lost or deleted data for free. The software supports most file formats and storage devices, and it has already been downloaded by over 2 million customers. PhotoRec is an open source data recovery utility designed to recover pictures, videos, and other common file formats from hard drives, memory cards, and digital cameras.

Just like TestDisk, PhotoRec is a command line utility with no graphical interface. R-Studio is a family of data recovery tools designed to solve just about any data recovery scenario. R-Studio can recover data from all major file systems, perform raw file search, fix startup issues, perform data recovery over LAN, and much more. Its intended audience are technicians and network experts tasked with recovering data from corporate networks and business computers. EaseUS Data Recovery is a well-designed application that can help you recover files from any hard drive with a few clicks.

The free version recovers up to 2 GB of data, and you can always purchase a PRO license to enjoy unlimited recovery. Regardless of which version of EaseUS Data Recovery you use, you can always preview lost files before recovering them, which helps recover only important files and leave everything else behind.

Wondershare Recoverit is a popular hard drive data recovery tool with a sleek design and excellent usability. The paid version of this capable data recovery tool can even scan, gather, and match the fragments of your corrupt videos, piecing them back together so you can play them again. The recovery process itself consists of just three steps, and you should be able to easily complete it without any prior data recovery experience. Recuva is a venerable data recovery tool for the Windows operating system that has been around for a long time.

The Professional version adds support for virtual hard drives and automatic updates, but neither of these two features is very useful. Developed by Prosoft Engineering Inc, Data Rescue 6 is a versatile HDD recovery software solution designed to meet the needs of home users and professionals alike. DiskGenius is an all-in-one hard drive management tool that can perform data recovery, back up important files, and partition storage internal and external hard drives.

The tool is regularly updated, and you can download it free of charge from its official website. Just keep in mind that the free version is limited, so you may need to spend some money to unlock the features you need.

The good news is that DiskGenius comes with a day money-back guarantee. The hard drive data recovery software applications listed in this article can deliver great results, saving the day when dealing with many different kinds of hard drive failure. As effective as they are, you can increase your hard drive recovery success rate even more by following the few simple tips below:.

These three simple tips can be the difference between partial data recovery and complete data recovery.