Hard drives are like any other electronic device exposed to damages and failures. But the first thing you must know is that in some cases you can recover your data.

Everybody has data after a while of using the home computer. Some of them are important. A hard drive failure can happen for different reasons : threadbare of  some electronic components or even mechanical, high voltages received from a malfunction power source. There were also some viruses in the past who rose the voltage from the motherboard destroying also the CPU. The CIH virus for example was taken the head of the hard disk drive and tried to read randomly sectors from the hard drive but without rising back the head. It resulted an incredible scratch of the hard drive’s plates and destroyed physically the plates. But it’s not our case. We will take in consideration the most of the situations: a boot hard drive failure.

Probably the most hard drive failures happen because of a logical problem, because of a missing boot sector or a failure to boot from the boot sector. You have important data for which you don’t have a back-up and you want to recover it. It’s the time to think to a hard drive recovery.

Depending upon the importance of your data you can opt for a specialized company which has these services, but it will cost you some money: hundreds of dollars in some cases. Or you can try by yourself if you have some knowledge of computers. If you have decided to make on your own you must have a second hard drive with sufficiently hard space to fill your lost data from the hard drive failed. Secondly you must have a boot disk, CD or DVD to boot from which has also recovery options. There are some free tools which you can download from the internet like Hiren’s Boot CD which at the moment of the writing is arrived at the version 9.2 or you can use Multi Boot Recovery Tool. Armed with one of these, you open your computer you boot from the CD/DVD drive and you choose the option Recover. You have many software there and depending on your needs you can choose between them. You can choose GetDataBack-NTFS or GetDataBack-FAT depending upon your file system. You have also customized settings and options. You must choose the hard drive source from where you want to recover data and the destination hard drive(the second hard drive) where you will put recovered data. Be careful to choose the right hard drives.

An important thing you must also know is that in a hard drive boot failure, your data are intact on the hard drives. It’s possible to recover all your data because of that containing also the structure of directories and files.