Hard Drive repair Using Free Software

Contrary to favorite belief, if a computer does not boot due to hard drive corruption all data is not lost and the hard drive may even be repairable. There are 2 types of hard drive damage. One is fixable by you and the other requires a expert data recovery facility.

Physical Drive Damage - corporeal damage is the worst. Data recovery can only be done by professionals and can cost up to ,500 (sometimes higher). corporeal damage ordinarily consists of bad actuator arms, damaged platters or fried controller cards.

Non-Physical Drive Damage - Non-Physical damage (Npd) is what we're going to be discussing in this article. Npd occurs when the operating system's file theory (fat or ntfs) gets corrupted due to an improper shutdown (for example). While this damage is may seem in fact bad (if it's preventing you from booting your Pc), it's in fact fixable with some software that's already together with in any Windows Pc and a Usb external hard drive enclosure.

Here are a list of items that you'll need to consequent the instructions below:

Another working computer with Windows Xp, Vista or Windows 7
Find out what kind of hard drive you have. There are 2 types. Sata (small flat connector) and Pata (a.k.a Ide) which has a connector with about 30 pins. An external Usb hard drive enclosure with a connector for the type of drive you're going to be connecting to it (you can grab one of these at BestBuy for about Usd).

Please consequent the steps below to achieve a non-physical mend (software repair) on a non-bootable hard drive.

1. Take the drive out of the computer.
2. Join together the hard drive to the connector on the Usb enclosure.
3. Join together a Usb cable from the enclosure to the computer that's working.
4. Power on the Usb enclosure.
5. An external drive will probably load in your list of ready hard drives. You can see this list by opportunity "My Computer" or "Computer". Take note of the drive letter for the external hard drive.
6. Now it's time to load a schedule called Chkdsk (Check Disk).
7. Click Start (if you're on Windows Xp) or click the Windows globe (on the lowest left for Vista and Windows 7).
8. On Windows Xp click Run, then type Cmd. On Windows Vista and 7 type Cmd where it says "Search Programs and Files". This will open a black command prompt window.
9. In the command prompt type chkdsk "the drive letter you want to check": /r and press enter. So here is an example chkdsk g: /r then press the enter key.
10. This process can take hours. I've had a few that took days.
11. If this command completes successfully your drive should be repaired enough for you to recover the data from it and you might in fact be able to boot from it again.

A word of warning. If your drive ever has any errors on it (bad sectors) it's reached the end of it's life and should be substituted Asap. You'll be able to see this in the narrative in case,granted to by the chkdsk command at the end of it's scan.

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