Data Recovery Options for an External Hard Drive

External hard drives have become a more popular method of handling data backups, both for businesses and for home use. For many families, an external hard drive serves as a file storage for the entire family’s needs – photographs, music files, financial plans, school papers and work files from everyone’s computers, all stored on a central external hard drive which everyone can access. So when that hard drive fails, it can be a major problem, not just for one person, but for the entire network that relies on it for backups and for network storage. If you’ve tried to access your external hard drive and found that it’s not available, these steps can help you recover the data from your drive, or protect it so that a professional data recovery service, such as Fields Data Recovery, can retrieve as much of it as possible.

First, determine whether your hard drive is in good mechanical working order. To do this, connect the hard drive directly to your computer and try to access it through your operating system. Listen for the drive spinning up or for any unusual sounds. If it makes any unusual sounds, including clicking or grinding, detach the hard drive from your computer and consult a professional data recovery service. Running your hard drive when there is a mechanical problem that’s causing scraping or grinding can obliterate data from it by physically damaging sectors on the drive.

If your computer doesn’t recognize the drive and/or it doesn’t spin up, remove the hard drive from its case and manually attach the drive to your PC. Try again to open the hard drive from your operating system. If the computer recognizes the drive this way, and your data appears to be intact, the problem is probably in the hard drive’s power supply. If that’s the case, you should find it fairly easy to transfer the files to another hard drive or to your computer.

Software Data Recovery

If your drive spins up, but the data is inaccessible, you may be able to retrieve the data from it with a software solution, either a purchased one or a free data recovery solution available online. If you choose to attempt your own data recovery, be sure that you follow the software instructions exactly to avoid losing more data. If you’re not confident in your ability to recover the data, outsource the data recovery to a professional data recovery service such as Fields Data Recovery.

If the drive is completely dead, do not attempt to recover the data yourself. A professional data recovery company has the facilities to open your hard drive safely and retrieve the data, so turn to the pros.