How to recover your hard drive

By Dina Gerdeman

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Your hard drive just crashed, and you're afraid you have lost a bunch of important files. What do you do?

First you swear a lot, then you let panic wash over you. Then you shoot a dirty look at the "helpful" family member who asks if you backed up your files on disk. (Of course you didn't.)

After all that, take a few deep breaths and know that there is a good chance you will see those lost files again. In fact, you may be able to recover them yourself.

First, you should make sure it really is the hard drive at issue. Remove the hard drive and use a USB universal drive adapter to hook it up as a secondary drive to another computer. If your files don’t show up, you know the hard drive is in trouble and you will have to invest some money in attempting to retrieve those family photos or that project for work. Remember that there are no guarantees your files will be recovered, yet in most cases, the data can be saved even when it appears that all is lost.

At times a hard drive may not sustain physical damage, but will still fail to call up its own data. You can use any number of diagnostic software programs to help figure out what’s wrong. Many companies offer free online demos that will run a scan of your hard drive and give you a rough idea of what, if anything, is salvageable before you spend money on their software.

Among the companies that offer recovery software are Ontrack Data Recovery, GetData, Stellar Information Systems, Nucleus Data Recovery, Prosoft Engineering and Disk Doctors.

Their products are easy to use. The software will walk you through the process of transferring the data. It can take several days to scan and recover data, depending on the size of your hard drive. You will likely have some sweeping up to do after your files are recovered because the names of your files will likely be changed to a gobbledygook series of letters and numbers.

Although these software programs can work miracles in some cases, sometimes it truly is hopeless to attempt a recovery yourself and you may need to seek help from an expert computer technician. There may be broken parts in your hard drive that are keeping it from operating correctly. You may hear a clicking sound as the parts attempt to do their job but can't quite seem to make it.

A data recovery expert will need to first fix what's broken and essentially rebuild your hard drive before finding your files. You can find experts at companies like Stellar Information Systems, Iomega and Kroll Ontrack, but be prepared to spend more than you would on software. Data recovery companies charge hundreds -- and sometimes thousands of dollars -- to return your files, so you need to decide just how much the lost data is worth to you.

Keep in mind that hard drives are comprised of a bunch of mechanical parts, so they will all eventually fail. If you're fortunate enough to get your lost data back, call it a lesson learned and start doing what no one wants to take the time to do: Back up important files just in case. Flash drives can be used as a backup for personal files, USB hard drives can copy your entire hard drive, and there are even online companies like DiskHero that offer automatic backup of important files for a monthly fee.