Hard drive recovery

Let's dispense with the I-told-you-sos. If you find yourself facing a data recovery job, then you have probably forgotten the cardinal rule of computing: All hard drives eventually fail. And you didn't back up your data, did you? We've been there—hey, everybody has to learn this lesson once. Now what?

Panic!

Just kidding. Actually, the first thing to do is determine if it really is a hard-drive failure you're confronting, and not one of the countless other equipment glitches that can cause a boot failure. If you have access to another computer, remove the failed hard drive from your sick PC, and hook it up as a secondary drive to the alternate computer. The easiest way to do this is through a USB universal drive adapter—it costs about $30 and is a good device to have around for all sorts of hard-drive diagnostics.

On a Mac, the process is a bit simpler. Use a FireWire cable to hook your nonworking Mac to a working Mac, then, "target boot" the nonworking machine by holding down the T key as you power it on. With either method, it's possible that your failed hard drive will show up on your healthy computer and reveal its files, in which case your hard drive is probably fine, but your operating system needs to be reinstalled. (Don't forget to offload your files before you do that.

Let's dispense with the I-told-you-sos. If you find yourself facing a data recovery job, then you have probably forgotten the cardinal rule of computing: All hard drives eventually fail. And you didn't back up your data, did you? We've been there—hey, everybody has to learn this lesson once. Now what?

Panic!

Just kidding. Actually, the first thing to do is determine if it really is a hard-drive failure you're confronting, and not one of the countless other equipment glitches that can cause a boot failure. If you have access to another computer, remove the failed hard drive from your sick PC, and hook it up as a secondary drive to the alternate computer. The easiest way to do this is through a USB universal drive adapter—it costs about $30 and is a good device to have around for all sorts of hard-drive diagnostics.

On a Mac, the process is a bit simpler. Use a FireWire cable to hook your nonworking Mac to a working Mac, then, "target boot" the nonworking machine by holding down the T key as you power it on. With either method, it's possible that your failed hard drive will show up on your healthy computer and reveal its files, in which case your hard drive is probably fine, but your operating system needs to be reinstalled. (Don't forget to offload your files before you do that.