Recover data from a faulty hard drive

Due to some fault in hard drive the reason may be overheating, dust inside the case, vista being a bit heavy or some undetected viruses on the machine, user lost important data. If the cause behind this problem is overheating make sure that it is free from any virus and clean the inner parts.

Symptoms
The hard disk is not working properly during boot up sequence. After removing the hard disk windows reported that the disk could not be read as it was not formatted.

Solution
Two completely free tools to recover data are Testdisk and PhotoRec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Testdisk
TestDisk is specially designed to recover lost partitions. It doesn’t use a GUI rather it uses text commands.

The second free tool is
PhotoRec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
It has no partition funda it just look at the data blocks and clusters on the disk. The advantage of this tool is that you can recover any data on the disk if the partition table is absent. This consists of deleted files and files that has been reformatted.

After going through the option in the program, you can select which type of files you want to recover.

One disadvantage of recovering all of the data is the original file names will be lost. Therefore you had some photos and one of them was called heaven then this name will be lost and you will see a list of files that looks like this.

Find the photos that you want and rename them.

Make sure you have an antivirus that is updated

PhotoRec is an effective tool to recover data from damaged disk, CD ROM and memory card such as SD and MMC. It also runs on a no. of operating systems.

• DOS/Win9x
• Windows NT 4/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7
• Linux
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• Sun Solaris
• Mac OS X

And can recover data from multiple file formats:

• FAT,
• NTFS,
• EXT2/EXT3 filesystem
• HFS+