Troubled with a failed hard drive? Use these tips to recover the lost data

A failed hard drive is more than a pain in the neck… it’s a bolt from the blue! The hard drive failure could be a logical or a physical one. The logical failure happens when the drive is incapable of tracking or finding its data, whereas the physical one happens due to some sort of hardware damage. In the latter case, you hear some sort of clicking sound as the hard drive tries to engage. But if you spend a hundred bucks of so, you can hopefully recover all your valuable data. It depends, actually. But if you are keen on the recovery from your failed hard drive, start by removing the damaged hard drive from your laptop / desktop computer.

On most laptops, there’s just one screw that holds the hard disk drive inside the machine. But there are a couple of more screws that hold it inside a cage within the machine. This gets a little trickier with desktops. So it’s better to consult the manual to get the right guidelines on removing the damaged hard drive. Hire someone or talk to somebody who has the know-how. You need to open the side panel and locate the hard disk drive. When you’re done, connect the damaged hard disk drive to a USB-to-IDE/SATA hard disk drive adapter, which you can buy for $30- $40. These types of cables are available at typical computer retailing stores. This adapter can fit most of the typical failed hard drive. The USB end has to be connected to a computer via Internet access. Once the external hard drive is connected, you will see a desktop icon that you have to double-click.

There are some rare instances where you do not need to do anything to access to the files. Just copy the data from your faulty hard disk drive to the new hard drive.