How To Get The Data From The Disk After Computer Crashes

This is one of the things I panic the most – when a user call me and tell me his/her computer has crashed, and none of the files on the disk has been backed-up. The first question that comes up is, can you recover the data? oh that question makes my head spin, because the data can be recovered depending on what happened to the disk. if its simply software related problems, like Windows boot sector being corrupted, or a virus or malware preventing the computer from functioning correctly, then yes the data can be recovered. but if the disk is physically damaged, if the heads that read the data  on the platters are broken etc, then is very unlikely the data can be recovered without paying a ton of money to a data recovery agency.

This is what I normally do when a computer crashes and data cannot be retrieved with software. If the computer is a desktop, I simply put the disk drive of the unbootable computer as a slave drive on a good working desktop, and get the data off of it as soon as possible. be careful with this method though, if the computer was crashed by a virus or any other malware  it can propagate to other healthy drives on the working computer, then you will end up with two cashed computers.

If the computer is a laptop, then you will need to use a USB hard drive adapter.

These adapters can be purchased on any computer store, and are normally very cheap, depending on which you buy. just make sure what type of hard drive your laptop has before buying it, IDE, SATA etc. otherwise you might end up buying an unusable cable. after you get the cable, just plug and play. your computer should recognize the drive as any other removable drive. get the data off of it as soon as possible.

Other Alternatives

If you don’t have a spare computer to use the bad hard drive as a slave, or a laptop to use the hard drive adapter, then try using a piece of software like bartPE. http://nu2.nu/pebuilder/ this software needs to be downloaded and then create a bootable live Windows CD. with the live windows CD you can boot up from your CD-ROM and hopefully the hard drive will be accessible so you can copy the files to a USB drive.