A ‘corrupted hard drive’ error message is enough to panic the general public. It doesn’t necessarily mean that each one is lost, however. With the correct tools and expertise, you’ll recover data from a corrupted Winchester drive (HD). During this article, we’ll undergo the steps you’ll have to fancy rescue your files.
Step 1: Identify the explanation for corruption
Corruption occurs when data within a file or device is altered from its original state, causing it to behave differently or become completely inaccessible.
The first step in repairing or retrieving data from a failing disc drive is to see what caused the corruption – and there are some possibilities:
- Age: In many cases, disc drive corruption occurs as a device ages. The info within it degrades over time (during operation or perhaps when the disc drive isn’t in use) to the purpose where files become unreadable.
- Malware/viruses: a scourge infection cannot cause physical damage to your disk drive, irrespective of what you may read in an exceeding ransomware email, but it can damage the information enough to create it unreadable to your computer.
Step 2: Recover data with data recovery software (with great care)
Most operating systems have basic measures to stop or fix disc drive corruption. Windows has CHKDSK and Mac has Disk Utility. While these built-in tools are often helpful in some cases for normal maintenance, they often cause more harm than good to corrupted hard drives and may prevent data from being recovered.
We recommend instead looking into third-party data recovery software. Sometimes these tools can find fragmented parts of damaged files on other sectors of your drive and rebuild them. Even when using the most effective tools, DIY data recovery will always carry significant risks. If you select this method, make certain to use it on a duplicate or image of your corrupted Winchester drive in order that you’ll always have the untouched original if something goes wrong.
Step 3: Seek help from a knowledgeable data recovery service
If you discover yourself out of options after exhausting all of the above, or if your disc drive isn’t readable, contact an expert data recovery service provider and explain things. While there are many DIY data recovery tools out there, it often takes specific skills to recover data from a corrupted Winchester drive, as no two recoveries are identical.