Corrupt hard disk recovery

Recover data from a corrupt hard disk

When you are working with computers and in the age where the cost per gigabyte is constantly dropping, external data storage devices such USB HDD are quite common. More common than the hardware is the failure such hardware.

If you've reached this blog and are still continuing to read so far, then I assume that you have an external HDD which has become inaccessible and you have some very critical data that you would like to recover.

Before we proceed and dwell deep into understanding how best we can recover the data, I should warn you about a few consequences:

- If the data is really 'dear' and 'important' to you, then I highly recommend contacting a professional to recover it for you.

However, if you one who would NEVER want someone else to touch your data (forget about recovering it and possibly keeping a copy for themselves); then you are on the right post.

I assume that you have tried a number of methods and covered the basic troubleshooting steps:

- Reboot your machine.

- Try connecting on a different machine.

- Try connecting on a different machine (You should give one of the linux flavors or Mac OSX a shot before you panic).

- You have verified that the cable is working fine.

You will find a number of blogs indicating different solutions. Although, a lot may work for you; I'm here to recommend a method that certainly worked for me.

One of the good things about disk drives is that, your data is never really 'deleted' but only overwritten. As long as you have not overwritten the disk sectors with new data or formatted using 1,2,3 etc pass overwrites, there is a good chance that your data is still intact..

A lot of the times the disk failures are mostly due to broken MFT or file system entries. If you are hard disk is being detected by the OS when you connect it then read along.

If your OS is capable of detecting the device but unable to open it and is prompting you to format it -> 'DO NOT FORMAT IT'.

What do I do?

HD Clone 5 [There is a free version!]

Link : HD Clone 5

Pre-requisites:

- HD Clone 5 setup

- Another HDD (Preferably not in a corrupted state and of size equal to or greater than the one you are trying to fix)

This little master has the capability to clone your corrupted HD into another by copying sector by sector.

Steps:

- Plug in your working hard disk -> Format it.

- Plug in your corrupted hard disk.

- Fire up HD Clone 5.

- Hit Clone

- Source -> your corrupted HD

- Destination -> your working HD

- Leave the options at default

- Let it 'clone'.

The cloning should take anything between 10-24 hours, depending on the size the condition of your drive.

Once the cloning is complete, you should be able to check how much data is actually accessible on your working HD.

If it looks satisfactory, then you have succeeded in recovering the data.

Next steps:

You can format your corrupted hard disk (which your Windows machine has been screaming at you to do).

You should have a clean hard disk now and if you wish you can copy the data back from the working HD to your original HD.

There are other various ways to recover, which are kind of out of scope of this article but I hope to cover those sometime soon in the near future.

Do read about TestDisk and CloneZilla for alternatives. There is wealth of information on their wiki/sites.

Hope this helps.