You may want to try a hard drive recovery program. Its a very powerful hard drive recovery program. All you need to do is burn it as a bootable floppy or cd, and it will scan and attempt to recover your data. The first step is to determine if it really is hard drive failure you are experiencing. OK, if youre running Windows, try to start up in Safe Mode.

Reboot your PC, and hit the F8 key when the computer is starting up. Choose the option to go into Safe Mode. Windows System Restore feature to get your PC up and running again. In some cases a damaged master boot record or partition table can render a disk unbootable, but all the data is still intact. See Fix MBR for some help with that relatively simple repair job. In one case, my hard drive got totally mucked up, and neither the FIXMBR nor FIXBOOT commands could restore the drive to working order. But I found a wonderful program called TESTDISK that was able to analyze the disk and recreate both the partition table and the boot record. TESTDISK did the job for me. There are still a couple of options available. Now pop open your computers system unit and try to reseat the hard drive. It might look scary at first, but theres nothing inside a computer that will bite you.

Unplug and reseat the all the cables that plug into the hard drive, then follow the cable to the motherboard and reseat that end as well. Its possible that the cable was just loose, and your drive will work fine after this simple procedure. You can also try swapping the IDE or SATA slot that the drive plugs into. Look for connectors on the motherboard labelled IDE1 and IDE2, or SATA0 and SATA1. Move the cable from one plug to the other, restart the system and hope for the best.

If all the above options fail you can assume your computer wasnt lying, the hard drive is faulty. There are methods available to try and get your data back. Hard Drive data recovery The practice of retrieving data from damaged or inoperable disk drives is known as data recovery.

Data recovery experts have a thriving business. Just like a car, a computer can break down and parts wear out. Hard drives are no exception. Because of this potential for failure, backing up crucial data to an external source other than your hard drive is essential. For now, lets assume you have hard drive failure with no backups of your files, and focus on what you can do to recover your data. There are programs available online that can be downloaded to aid in data recovery. One program is Inspector file recovery, which will help to recover Windows files. The program is free, however you do need to have a secondary hard drive installed with a Windows OS on it.

Another program is TOKIWAs Data Recovery. USB drive or a floppy disk and run it on the PC that the unreadable drive is attached to. ProSofts website offers Data Rescue II, an application available for download for free trial to recover Mac files. Linux, that will recover Linux and some versions of UNIX files. These are remote data recovery sites. OnTrack is one site that provides this service. Another data recovery company is Web Recover, which will attempt to recover your data through a web browser. The above programs and services will be able to recover your data, provided your hard drive problem is not a purely mechanical one. Often, drive failure error messages stem from a bad sector or failing partition on the drive. BIOS cannot recognize the drive, then you are looking at mechanical disk drive failure.