How to Recover Data from a Corrupt Hard Drive

Hard Drive is the most important way of data storage and needs to be handled carefully. However, the situation gets worse when hard drive gets corrupt due to some problem with it, such as virus infections, damage to some data file etc. Whatever be the reason, ultimately you come across a dangerous situation of data loss. As a hard drive consists of everything on a system, corruption makes all the data inaccessible. A relieving thing is that most data from a corrupt hard drive can be recovered if you do not save new data to it as doing so may overwrite the hard drive and the data goes permanently.

Moreover, if you attempt to format the partitions to avoid the data loss situation may also be harmful. If you attempt to scan the hard drive for viruses, it is always great to create backups regularly.

If you have lost data due to corruption in hard drive, there are several recovery options that vary according to operating system because different file systems are used by different operating systems. You can perform Windows data Recovery by performing the following steps:

1. Install Windows or any operating system on the other hard drive.

2. Run utilities like Scandisk or CHKDSK from the other OS on affected drive (Make sure that you do not use the same operating system disk repairing utilities).

3. Scan the corrupt drive for viruses; take the backup before scanning.

4. Take the backup of critical/important files on the temp drive.

5. Use a clean floppy to boot, run FDISK on the bad drive and then reboot.

6. Again use the clean floppy, and format the bad drive.

7. Perform reinstallation of Windows on the drive you corrected.

8. Restore the files from backup to the corrected drive.

9. If there is any hardware failure in bad drive, keep temporary drive.

If a hard drive contains bad sectors, they cannot be used and when you format the disk, the bad sectors are identified by the operating system. The OS marks the bad sectors so that their usage is avoided.

Nonetheless, if a sector that contains data, encounters corruption, some special and effective recovery techniques are required to recover data.

However, some built-in data recovery techniques fail to perform as expected sometimes and you might face a situation when you are not able to recover the data from a corrupt drive. In this case, it is best to use data recovery software application that will recover the data from a corrupt hard drive, formatted partition etc. Such applications are enriched with great features and user interface as well as they perform incredibly well. Therefore, it is better and wise choice to pay a bit to gain much more. You can find the software over the Internet; get one by ordering it online.