How to Recover Data from the Hard Drive of a Dead Laptop

If your PC or laptop crashes down due to some software or hardware failure and leaves you behind with a dead system in that case the first thing that comes to your mind is that you will lose the access to all of your data, but you can successfully retrieve your data from the hard drive so that you won’t lose the important data. Follow the steps illustrated below to recover data from failed system or dead hard disk drive.

You can successfully retrieve your data by using recovery methods that don’t require any advanced technological knowledge.

Find out the Type of Failure

Before arriving into any type conclusion, figure out the type of hard drives failure. HDD can crash due to logical failures or mechanical failures. Logical failures occur from corrupt files or accidental formatting of the drives. While logical failures do not damage files, they render drives incapable of navigating their own data. Mechanical failures result from parts of the drive being physically broken. An effective way to determine the type of failure is by listening to the drive.
If you hear a clicking sound or any kind of noise while accessing any file on the system then it’s a mechanical failure, which needs experts to fix the issue. If no such sound is heard, then it may be logical failure due to corrupt file. In these situations, you can purchase and install software like data recovery NTFS, etc. to recover the data.

Connecting the Drive To Another PC

Files or data from a crashed hard drive or from a dead laptop can be retrieved by simply accessing the drive using another computer. Pull out the hard drive from your laptop and place it in an external case and connect it with another working computer via USB port. Different computers have specific hard drive models, so before purchasing any type of hardware unit check for the specifications of the dead laptop. If the drive’s files are recoverable, then the drive and its files will show up on the healthy or the working computer and you can begin recovery.

PC Repair Tools to Recover Files

You can recover the data through the use of PC repair tools that attempt to fix any issues that may have caused your hard drive to crash. These products can be downloaded to your computer to perform tasks such as correcting third-party application errors and repairing corrupt files without the need to remove your hard drive. Different software is available to recover data from the failed HDD. Install the program, choose the defective drive as your source and select a destination folder to receive the data.

File Cloning Using Live CD

This is an alternate method to retrieve the data from the crashed HDD. File cloning involves booting a damaged computer that uses the Windows operating system with a second operating system such as Linux. On a second computer, you will need to download a Linux Live CD and burn to a blank CD. Restart the malfunctioning computer and change the boot sequence to “boot from CD.” Insert the disk and copy the hard drive contents onto the disk.

If the hard drive crashed due to mechanical failure, then you need to consult computer experts. The steps discussed above will help you recover your data from a failed or dead PC or laptop.