If the hard drive is physically damaged or cannot be detected by the bios (see below for a trick that may help in some cases) then your only option if you need the data to be recovered is to use a specialist data recovery company such as Ontrack or Convar. However this will be expensive.

Hopefully you are reading this before you need to use the UBCD4Windows, in which case back up your important data now to other media.

The following advice is from my own experience of data recovery.

If the hard drive doesn’t appear to be physically working one trick is to put it in the freezer, yes you read correctly put it in the freezer in an air tight bag and squeeze all the air out of the bag. This won’t work in all cases of hard drive failure, but I’ve had success doing this in the past and it does work. DO NOT do this if you hard drive is making a loud scraping noises etc…. Your drive is physically damaged and you need to send it off to the professionals for data recovery, the more you use the drive the less likely data will be recovered.

If the drive is accessible after you remove it from the freezer you need to keep the hard drive cool as you will only get a limited time of being able to access the data on the drive, heat killed the drive so you need to keep it cool. Hard drives coolers are a very good idea. Akasa 3½ cooling fans are very good and cheap, but there are others out there. Having the PC case open is also a good idea and having a room fan pointing in the case will also help to keep the temp down on the hdd. If it’s a dusty case you may want to get the vacuum cleaner out first you have a fan blowing dust everywhere.

If you can see your data, copy it off to another media ie USB hard drive or burn it to CD.

If the still can’t see the data try running PC Inspector file recovery and use Find Lost Drive option, select logical drive and use the options where drive letters are listed ie WinXP on Windows drive C. This could take time which is why you will have to keep the drive cool. Or try Test Disk and see check the partition information on the hard drive.

If the drive is physically damaged and you wish to try recovering the data I would suggest using Unstopable Copier, but in attempting this you may damage the disk even more making recovery impossible even for the specialists.

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Recovering deleted files

Use the UBCD4Windows disk. Don’t keep booting into Windows as this could write data over the deleted files.

There are several tools you can use to recover deleted data.

Restoration
Handy Recovery
PC Inspector File Recovery

PC Inspector also has a Find Lost Data option, which may help. If you get an error message when trying to use this option run chkdsk.

DO NOT restore the files to the HDD you are recovering from, always copy to another partition or hard drive. If you use the same Partition your are recovering from you may go over other data you need to recover. If you’ve deleted a file Windows sees that as free space so could potentially use it.

If the above tools can’t recover the file and you need the data your only option will be to pay the professionals.

O&O DiskRecovery functionality begins where other programs leave off. This software combs every sector of a hard disk, memory card, or digital camera to find lost files. Even when files systems are formatted or destroyed, it is possible to reconstruct once deleted data. Over 300 file types can be recognized and restored, including Word documents, Excel workbooks, Access Databases, and virtually every sort of commonly used graphics, photo, movie, and music formats (JPEG, AVI, MPEG, MP3, WAV, BMP, TIFF, Corel Draw, Photoshop, Framemaker, Adobe Illustrator, and many more). Do not give up on lost data! O&O DiskRecovery can still help even when things look hopeless.

    *  Deleted without Recycle Bin, or when Recycle Bin has been emptied;
    * Removed by virus attack or power failure;
    * After the partition with the files was reformatted, even for different file system;
    * When the partition structure on a hard disk was changed or damaged. In this case, R-Studio utilities can scan the hard disk trying to find previously existed partitions and recover files from found partitions.
    * From hard disk with bad sectors. R-Studio Data Recovery Software can first copy the entire disk or its part into an image file and then process such image file. This is especially useful when new bad sectors are constantly appearing on the hard disk, and remaining information must be immediately saved.