How to recover data from a damaged or spoiled HD

Whether you're a coach or not, surely at some point in your life you will go through the misfortune of having a corrupted or damaged hard drive. The hard drive failures are almost inevitable. Even, I have a theory that the sequence of life is this: You're born, grows, spoils the HD of your computer, reproduces, grows old and dies.

Before you take any further action about the incident, it is extremely essential that you test your hard drive on another machine. The best way to do this is to use a USB to IDE / SATA, which causes your hard drive to function as an "external hd." If you do not have one available, you can connect the HD directly into another computer as a secondary drive. If you do this, make sure that the machine is configured to recognize both drives in the BIOS, or you will not be able to access the second partition.

It is important that the hard drive is connected as Secondary (SLAVE), for acting in this way, even if the disc is slightly damaged, it is possible to have it recognized. If you have difficulties as configuring a new hard drive, a brief searched on Google can help you with that.
Try copying the data to another drive

After connecting the drive to another computer internally or with the USB adapter, make sure you can browse the contents of the hard drive. If you can, try to copy the data off the HD (store on a flash drive, for example). There are high chances that only the operating system is corrupted and user data are still good.

Place the hard drive in the freezer

If all other methods fail, there is another non-traditional method that can allow you to recover files from your hard drive, and this method is based on the placement of your HD in the freezer.

The first thing to do is remove the drive from the computer and put it in a sealed plastic bag to prevent condensation. Then put the drive in a freezer or freezer of your refrigerator and leave it there for several hours (or even during the night). Done so, remove the hard drive from the freezer, and connect it to the computer quickly. If it works, I thought would need to copy your files immediately as it will not take long for the disc starts to fail again.

This is because the cold is able to "shrink" the disk and the read head in a few millimeters, so that they do not abut, and can rotate smoothly.
Use a data recovery service

Finally, if none of these methods work, then their problems are much bigger than you imagined it would be, and you need to contact a data recovery service.


These companies use the same technique used by researchers to retrieve files burned and scrapped worldwide hard drives. If you need the same information from your machine, they can certainly help you.