Recover Data From an External Hard Drive

The hard drive is not the most vital part of a computer, but it is probably the most important part to you. Why? It contains all your data--every paper you have written, every digital picture, every music and video file and all your programs and games. When the hard drive stops working or gets accidentally erased, it is worse than losing your wallet. Luckily, there are ways to recover data in many cases. See the steps below to see if you can get some of the data from your external hard drive back.

Step1
Boot your computer normally with the external hard drive attached.

Step2
Download the freeware data recovery program PC Inspector (see the link in Resources) and install on on your main computer drive. Do not attempt to install anything on the external drive, as it may overwrite your data.

Step3
Run PC Inspector. If you accidentally deleted files on your external hard disk, select "Recover deleted files." If you formatted your disk accidentally or a system crash damaged your data, select "Find lost data." If you cannot find the drive letter or access your drive at all, select "Find lost drive."

Step4
Select the logical or physical hard drive that contains the lost data. A logical drive means a partition or virtual drive and a physical drive means a whole hard drive. Some drives are divided in to multiple partitions.

Step5
Click on the green check to scan for data. Recover all data by saving on your main system drive. Depending on the health of the external hard drive, you can now reinstall the data.

Step6
Send in physically defective drives. If the drive has some sort of mechanical issue, you will not be able to do anything but send it in to a hard drive recovery service like the ones listed in Resources.

Notice
Hard drives can crash or get erased for a number of reasons. It is an unfortunate fact of life. Taking precautions by backing up your important data periodically to insure against data loss.
( Source CNN )