How to recover hard drive data

There are a few data recovery softwares available. For them to work, you will need to remove the affected drive and connect it to another active system. Make sure you have the necessary tools and equipment. Once you connect the drive to your system, proceed to download the data recovery softwares.
A note of concern here - make sure your active system has an updated anti virus solution in place. You cannot be sure of what might have caused the hard disk to go damaged. Something on it may make your active system go dizzy and start misbehaving.

A few good data recovery softwares are -

1. Recuva
Recuva is in fact the number one data recovery software. It has been an indispensable option for Windows data recovery solutions. It makes the daunting task simple and easy. What's more - it's free!

2. TestDisk
This is yet another great tool for recovering the data from a damaged hardware. Again a free tool, it runs on any partition type. It can recover data real.quick.

Best strategy would be to avoid working with the drive once you realize that it is damaged. The more you work with it, more data will be overwritten. Thus making recovery next to impossible.

Here is an advice though not related to the question under discussion. I would advice all of those to use some data backup strategy to avoid such issues. Opt for some sort of backup. Go for both local and online backup strategy. Every hard drive is bound to fail and when it does, you will not need to run from pillar to post trying recover your data. You can simply format the drive (if it is still usable) or just replace it.

Assuming this is your work machine and the hard disk is not detecting. That means you have to find another machine and try one of the below software to recover data. First recover the data and then perform disk tools operation on your HDD.

1. PC Inspector File Recovery - This software allows you to connect your harddisk. This could be HDD or the USB HDD. First you have to let it scan so that it can go through the available data. And once you finish the scan let it go through recovery. It will try to recover as much data as possible. However if the same file is overwritten by another in it's place then it becomes harder. So make sure that you have not overwritten stuff. Also copy the recovered files on another drive. It supports both NTFS and FAT file system so recovery won't be harder.


2. Pandora File Recovery - This software does support Windows XP but make sure that you download old version. Also once downloaded scan for the deleted data on the drive of your requirement. Once it scans you get the idea of how much recovery is possible. It supports NTFS and FAT file system. It is free of cost to download.

After you get the data from the HDD. Create one bootable disk for running admin tasks such as recovering your Windows XP boot sector. And if this fails you can simply format the disk and start over.

Note : Most of the softwares from official website have now closed the support for the Windows XP. So your only option is to download older version of those softwares from the SoftPedia, Tucows or MajorFile etc. These sites host the file versions as old as possible.