You try to restore a hard drive after it crashes. There are two types of hard drive crash – mechanical or logical. The reasons for mechanical crash include malfunctioning of the drive itself or wear and tear of either the platter or the motors. Logical crash occurs due to many reasons. It could happen when you try to install new software, or when the device driver is not compatible, or due to software malfunction or any other human errors. In both cases you will get almost similar kinds of messages. One of the ways to confirm the cause of the crash is by checking for noises. If you hear cranking, grinding or clicking noise when you try to boot the system, it is most likely to be a physical crash.

You can make the drive functional again by restoring the hard drive. Restoring fixes the system files and corrupt boot table, making the hard drive functional again. System recovery option available in your computer can be used to restore the hard drive. This will restore the hard disk to original factory settings. This process makes your old data inaccessible.

So, if you want to recover data from a crashed hard disk, restoring hard disk alone will not help. Data recovery can be done only with the help of computer service labs or by using data recovery software. Recovery of data from hard disk will depend largely on post crash usage of the drive as well. That is if you use the hard drive actively after restoring the drive, or if have tried to repeatedly reboot the system, or if you have installed any software on the drive, this will have an impact on the stored data.

Steps to be followed in case of hard drive crash

Even if your hard drive crashes, all your data will still be available in the drive. However, if you reboot the system after restoring hard disk, the temporary files created by the system will over write the stored data. So for optimum recovery of data you should