Hard drive recovery

Anyone know if it's possible to recover data of a hard drive? My computer won't boot up and I'm 90% sure its the hard drive, like a nob I haven't backed up any of my fishing photos, think I will cry if I can't get them back lol!
 
Hi Luke.

9 times out of ten you can still recover the data of the hard drive.

Generally the data will still be stored on the drive even if your pc does not boot up.

A few ways of sorting this.

1. Need to take the hard drive out of that pc. And to attach the drive to another pc via a external connection cable.

2. Try and recover the OS and see if it boots into the system then recover the data straight away.


Don't take it to PC world. They will charge you a small fortune and probably muck it up anyway.

Don't take it the wrong way but your welcome to sort out a secure postage to my work place and I can have a look for you. I have worked in IT support in education for quite a few years, so this type of work is normal.

Feel free to pm me if you want.

Matt
 
luke if you are feeling brave you can boot with an ubuntu disk and just copy your data off.

Like Matt says, the data is probably unaffected its just the PC not booting.


Just dont format, dont take it to pc world and DO buy another drive!
 
I will buy another drive, I'm quite computer minded but neve come up against a hard drive failure before, would local computer shops be able to sort it?
 
I'm sure they could. But you risk them not saving everything you want to keep.

Do you have the restore discs? Is it a laptop?

you might be able to do it yourself
 
I will buy another drive any recommendations?
I'm quite computer minded but never come up against a hard drive failure before, would local computer shops be able to sort it? Ain't fussed about anything else I just need my pictures :worried:
 
Is it a tower or a laptop?

Be dead easy to recover the pictures with a boot disc and a spare drive (even a USB one)

Cant really recommend anything without knowing some info though :smile:
 
BUY A HARD DRIVE CADDY LUKE which links to usb and you will be able to recover ypur data 90% of the time.

they are around a £10 , I would recommend a samsung spin point hard drive 7200 :smile:
 
Shame you're not closer as I could help, any named HDD as a replacement should be fine they're pretty cheap these days too.

Often you can just plug the old drive in as a second drive and access you're files again.

At point do you get in the post/boot sequence? (I used to do hardware diagnostics for a living)
 
Just goes tO the safe mode, safe networking and restart in normal mode(along those lines) if I select any of them it goes to load windows then just restarts!

Thing is, I can't find boot CDs :|
 
Sounds like an issue with the operating system more than the disk.

If you had the windows disks you could do a repair on windows which wouldnt touch any files but restore any damaged/missing system files.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...ce-b5fb-4488-8c50-fe22559d164e&displaylang=en

Alternative would be to use a Linux live cd of some form which is essentially an operating system in a CD which will run on your machine and you can access the hard disk via that and recover any files you need onto something external.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ is useful if you know what you're doing or just use http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download.

There are plenty of ways to do it without having to splash on a new drive.
 
An error message did come up something along the lines of hard drive stopped working then I reset system then this happened?
Also something comes up on start up but I will have to have a look tomorrow!