Hard drive not responding? The computer stops recognizing your drive? Hear a strange clicking buzz sound? Your disk is probably dying, which will lead to a permanent loss of your valuable data even worse. Is there any chance to revive a failed hard drive and rescue your data? If yes, what should you do? Let’s head straight into this article to know everything about the “recover data from dead hard drive” topic.
The possibility of HDD data recovery will mostly depend on the types of hard drive failures. A damaged or dead hard disk drive is prone to be caused by two types of failures: logical failure and physical/mechanical failure.
In a logical failure, components inside the hard drive are not physically damaged. The failed hard drive just can’t find the location of its data because of some situations like improper formatting, file system corruption, malware/virus infection, etc.
In a physical/mechanical failure, the drive parts are physically broken, thus preventing the dead hard drive from normal function. This usually happens due to power surges, exposure to excessive heat and moisture, physical crash, etc.
If your hard drive suffers a severe mechanical damage, it would be pretty difficult to restore files from the dead hard drive. Your only reliable choice is to contact a hard drive data recovery service and to seek for any professional advice given by the specialists.
While in case of logical damage or a minor physical damage (disk sectors haven’t been corrupted), the data recovery of a failed hard drive will become much easier and more achievable. Follow up the subsequent parts in your attempts to get back your data.
Notes:
To quickly determine which failure type your dead drive is engaged in, please refer to the information below.
Common symptoms of logical hard drive failure:
1. Missing files and folders
2. Frequent error messages
3. Slow file access and folder opening
4. System freezes
5. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring errors
Common symptoms of physical/mechanical hard drive failure:
1. Unusual clicking noises coming from the drive
2. Overheating
3. Blue/black screen of death
4. Inability to launch computer
5. Increasing number of bad sectors
To recover data from a dead hard drive disk with logical damage, a piece of HDD data recovery software must be your second-to-none option, safer and more efficient than any other possible approaches.
Cisdem Data Recovery is highly recommended. It’s capable of reverting all lost files back under a wide range of scenarios, including crashed internal hard drive, corrupted external hard disk, dynamic disk, memory card, SD card, RAID, micro card and a lot more. This incredible tool can recover data even from a dead internal disk that won’t boot up. It enables users to create a bootable drive for initiating the dead hard drive and then extracting the lost data.
Main features of Cisdem Data Recovery:
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 
Free Download macOS 10.9 or later 
Notes: Here Cisdem will erase all data saved in this USB drive for formatting. Remember to back up important data before creating.
The above step-by-step guide is specialized for how to retrieve data from a crashed/dead internal hard drive on PC. Supposing there’s a need to recover lost data from dead external hard drive, connect the drive with computer, switch to PC Recovery mode in Cisdem Data Recovery, and pursue step 6 and step 7 described previously.
Alternatively, for dead HDD data recovery on Windows/Mac, we have dug out another 3 solutions for your information. It should be kept in mind that they do not come with a 100% guarantee to recover your lost files successfully.
This is always the first place we’re obliged to go. Lost files may stay in the computer recycle bin for a certain period, instead of going away immediately and permanently. So go to check the Recycle Bin in Windows PC or the Trash can in Mac computer, and verify if your disappearing files are present there. If yes, right click them, choose Restore or Put Back for retrieval.
At the aid of backup, your files lost due to hard drive failure can be recovered without a hassle. This requires us to have been made any backup files or configured any backup features before the hard drive disk becomes dead/damaged.
Nowadays people might adopt a variety of backup methods. Here we will explore the steps to recover data from a dead hard drive with Windows Backup and Restore or Mac Time Machine. Certainly, other utilities such as File History, Previous Versions, or cloud platforms like OneDrive, iCloud are also utilized for data backup.
Your dead hard drive is possibly to run into a minor logical damage. In this case you’re suggested to fix the dead hard drive issue firstly, so that the drive data could be accessed in a much easier manner. Try to use the built-in disk management utility on both Windows and Mac to repair the problematic HDD and make data accessible.
On Windows:
Tips: After formatting, all the data will be erased from your hard drive. Then you’d better use a dedicated data recovery application like Cisdem Data Recovery to retrieve the lost files.
On Mac:
Hard drive failures seem to be inevitable, most of which will finally result in data loss problem. Let it suffice to say that recovering data from a dead hard drive is a tough yet complicated thing. To restore files from crashed HDD with logical damage, we recommend Cisdem Data Recovery. But if your hard drive involves in the physical failure, no one else but a data recovery expert might do you a favor to some extent.
Connie has been writing for Mac productivity and utility apps since 2009. Each review and solution is based on her practical tests, she is aways energetic and trustworthy in this field.
