How to recover Data from a dead hard drive?

connect the drive to another computer and see if it works or at least spins up and gets detected, then try running a program like spinrite on it if it does spin up.

sometimes if it spins up but nothing is detected, it can be that the circuit board was fried and you can buy the same exact hard drive then swap in the new board.

If all else fails then you will have to send the drive off to a data recovery company and they are not cheap.

I certainly understand your concerns when it comes to dying hard drives while at university/college. I am a recent college graduate and halfway through my college experience my hard drive died. But I had a backup plan in place in case such an event would happen.

I had a secondary PC available and ready to go as hot standby that was only designated for my college work. I also backed up my data to an online service called ADrive (http://www.adrive.com/), which gives you 50GB of free online storage and backup. The only downside is that you have to to the backup manually. The good news is that when my disaster happened, I was back up and running fully functional after about two hours. All I did was physically set up a replacement PC, and copied my files back down from my online service. Of course I periodically burned my data to local DVD discs for archival purposes and extra safety.

If you are looking for something that is automated and takes place without intervention while your PC is inactive, buy a paid subscription like Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/) is the way to go. Backing up to the internet/cloud via subscription services like Carbonite is slow (very slow for the initial backup, but much quicker for incremental backups) depending on your connection and it safer than a local NAS in case of theft, fire or any other disaster you that can conceive of. The best part of it is that Carbonite keeps your online storage account and your local hard drive synchronized up to date.

The rule of thumb for maintaining important data safely is to have no less than three copies of it in no less than three different formats, in no less than three different locations.

Best solution:

Back up regularly on an external source.

All these other things are great, but if you backup regularly and something happens, you won't need to stress about immediately getting the information off of your hard drive, because you'll have most of it backed-up elsewhere.

If you don't have a lot of really important documents, Dropbox is free for up to 2GB, and you can get more storage space as needed. If you have a lot of stuff that you need to back up, I would recommend a USB External Hard Drive. They are relatively cheap in comparison to how useful they can prove to be.

hey bro ..u need take the Hdd out and try to make ur hdd on ur frends comp. adn try to recover ur data..if dont wanna put it on any 1s computer then try External hhd enclosure or dock USB 1. By this u can retrieve ur data try softwares .or else dont wanna take a risk try giving professional out in market, they will do that but might take big load of money too. hope this will help u.tc .reply soon.

Take precautions. Mozy is a fairly cheap resource to keep your files backed up regularly. And I'm not following the trend and saying the same thing everyone else said, because it's overkill. Still, backing up your files is a good way to keep from losing them. =)

if your data is that precious to you, why don't you store it online? some email companys offer free file storage, and you can find a few free online storage sites. buy a cheap external drive, put your most precious files on it and send it to a friend.

these methods would be much cheaper then data recovery if the drives died, or there was a fire that destroyed all your stuff.

since you still have access to your files, backup and don't ever get into the situation were you have to face recovering them

May I suggest prevention?

Buy another drive, identical to, or larger than the current drive, and keep all data on both drives.

I suggest keeping the backup external, and plugging it on only when you need to copy files.