Extracting data from broken hard disks

Asked By James H Conner 40 points N/A Posted on - 02/11/2015

I have a five to six old hard disk lying around and I my opinion I think that most of them are broken. The thing is that most of them contain data that are important to me. Is there a way for me to extract the data, even though the enclosure does not appear to be working properly?

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Answered By Sharath Reddy 590495 points N/A #189674

Extracting data from broken hard disks

There is no way you can access those important data if your hard drive is unreadable or the hard drive itself is undetectable in the BIOS whether the hard drive is new or old there’s no difference. If you want to recover your files from an old hard drive, make sure the BIOS can still detect it.

Connect the hard drive to your CPU then verify that BIOS can detect it after starting the CPU. If the drive is detected, wait until Windows has finished booting then scan the drive for any signs of infection using your antivirus. Once verified that the old hard drive is clean, try copying the files from the old hard drive into a folder in your local drive.

Do this on all your old hard drives to recover any files that you think are important. In case you encounter a hard drive that cannot be detected in the BIOS, check the drive’s jumper setting. It should be master, slave, or cable select and not parked. When it is set to parked, it disables the drive.

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• Posted on - 02/14/2015
• Question Category: Embedded Hardware