How to Recover Data from a Crashed Hard Drive

Before you can do any work on the crashed drive you will need to remove it from the current machine and connect it to another machine as a secondary drive.  The best way to do this is to use a USB to IDE/SATA adapter.
If you don’t have one available then you may be able to connect the drive to another desktop computer internally as a secondary drive.  If you do, make sure that the machine detects the drive in the BIOS or you won’t be able to access it once the computer starts up.

Try to Copy the Data to Another Drive

After you connect the drive to another computer either internally or with the USB adapter, check to see if you can browse the contents of the drive.  If you can, try to copy data off that you would like to recover.  There is a chance that only the operating system is corrupt and the user data is still fine.

Use Data Recovery Software

If you can’t manually copy the user data off then you can try to recover it using data recovery software.  Whatever you do, do not install the recovery software on to the drive that you are trying to recover data from. Doing so could actually overwrite files that you want to restore.

PC Hard Drive Recovery

free hard drive recovery tool from Piriform (the makers of CCleaner) and is one of the best free PC data recovery tools available.  Even if the drive has been formatted, Recuva can scan the drive recover files. If the basic scan fails, there is also a deep scan to discover more deeply-buried results.  There is also a portable version if you don’t want to install the full version.

When you launch Recuva, you will be presented with a wizard that will guide you through restoring your files.  First you will choose the type of file you need to recover, then the location, and then start the scan or choose “Enable Deep Scan” if the quick scan doesn’t find the files you need to recover.