SATA interfaces are most common on newer machines, and can be identified by the flat connector style, whereas IDE connectors consist of two rows of pins. You can determine which you have simply by looking at the drive after removing it from your system. The two hard drive interface types: SATA, left, and IDE (aka PATA), right. The enclosure must also support the correct interface used by that drive: IDE/EIDE/PATA, or SATA. Two common hard-disk drive sizes.Ĭurrent drives are either 3.5 inches or 2.5 inches wide, and the enclosure must match. You need to get the correct-sized enclosure for the physical size of your drive. These are almost identical to any external USB drive, except there’s no drive inside. Perhaps the most flexible way of dealing with a hard drive in a dead computer is to purchase a USB hard-disk drive enclosure. If those options don’t work or don’t help, it’s time to try something else. (If not, you can get your money back.) SpinRite boots from its own media and can attempt to both diagnose and possibly repair errors on the disk surface. If you can’t boot at all, or if CHKDSK doesn’t help, it might be worth buying SpinRite to see if it can repair the drive. That will scan the disk for surface errors that can cause the disk to become inaccessible. If you can boot the machine into safe mode, then the place to start is to run CHKDSK /R on the drive. And, occasionally, there are other reasons - like a last-minute change that was important, but not yet saved online - that might still require retrieving data off the dead drive. Unfortunately, the reality is that most people don’t have a comprehensive backup plan in place. Simply do your work in a DropBox folder, remember to “Save” periodically, and even if the machine dies completely, the work in progress will have been saved online. Restore the last-minute changes from the online service that you’ve been using for more-or-less continuous backups.With that simple action, you’d be no more than one day out of sync with your work. This is why I like taking image backups every day. Restore as much as you want - potentially the entire system - from your most recent image backup.Using another computer, or after the dead computer has been repaired: I’ll start with my favorite: not needing to do it at all.īy far, the simplest solution to this problem is not needing to solve it at all.īy that I mean that a good backup strategy can almost eliminate the need to try to recover the hard drive in a dead computer. There are several approaches to this problem. Of course, if it’s the drive itself that caused the failure, things get a little more interesting. This is a pretty common scenario. Depending on what caused the computer’s demise, there’s a relatively good chance you can retrieve the information off that hard drive.
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