What to do with a crashed hard drive

There are a lot of things that can happen to your hard drive because according to many, it is the part of the computer that is most prone to fail. So what should be done if your hard drive has suddenly crashed? It will depend on its symptoms,

If your hard drive spins but erratically, you might have data corruption due to a failing drive. These steps that follow will help you recover your data and move it to a good drive before the bad drive dies.

1. If you are using an IDE drive, make sure that the data cable is properly connected. If it is old and worn, replace it because it might cause a short in the cable.

2. Try using a Knoppix CD or another boot disk to check if the drive can still be read. If it can still be read, immediately transfer all data to another drive and try to reformat the original disk to see if it is possible to salvage.

3. Bad sectors might be present you can download a HDD regenerator to find it and recover it. Some websites feature manufacturer specific utilities for any hard drive vendor. Try to download an appropriate diagnostic application from the manufacturers of the hard drive. You can use the website by TackTech's.

4. If the drive cannot boot, try to use data recovery software to salvage the lost files.

If the hard drive does not want to spin at all, you can try these few suggestions. Be sure to avoid tapping, beating on the drive, removing the cover and exposing the heads. It may lead to losing data and making its damage irreversible.

• Hold the drive in your left hand and rotate the platters several times like you are throwing a Frisbee. Just make sure that you do not hit the disk on anything. This is to remove stiction or static friction, which stops drive platters from spinning.
• Attach the drive to a high wattage power supply. The extra wattage can jerk it into spinning for the last time and enable you to recover the data inside.
• If your drive clicks but not spins, place the drive into a plastic freezer bag, wrapped in a paper towel to protect it from moisture. Put it into the freezer for a few hours. Let it thaw afterwards in room temperature. Although there is no fixed number of hours that you have to leave it in the freezer, you just have to try it for several hours to see if you can still make it spin one more time.
• If ever you get to make it spin, do not let it stop until you have copied all critical data because once it stops, it may never spin again.
• When all else fails, you can bring it to a repair shop to recover your data. It will be expensive but at least you can still get back your data.

To avoid this from happening again in the near future, try to make back-ups of all data stored plus take care of your hard drive properly.