Many people won’t be able to afford a hard drive data recovery, because it can be very expensive. Even if you are able to afford it, in some cases you can repair the hard drive yourself. It might be a bit complicated, but if you do some proper research, you will be able to do it. In this article I will try to shortly explain, what you need to do if your hard drive crashed.

If you are lucky, the hard drive crashed because of a logical problem and Windows will detect it. You can try to recover the files. To do that you should try to repair the master boot record, in case it was damaged. This can be easily done in MS-DOS by using the command “FDISK.EXE /MBR”.

The MBR is placed right to the beginning of the hard drive. It is better known as the boot sector. It contains very valuable information, without it the operating system wouldn’t be able to use a hard disk. The MBR can be fixed, if damaged, with a program called MaxLLF. If you still can’t format the drive, there is nothing you can do, except send it to a company to check it out.

Maybe the hardest part of this procedure is to run MS-Dos, especially if you are using Windows XP or Vista. If you don’t know how to get to MS-DOS all you have to do is get a few diskettes and transform them into MS-DOS boot disks. You can do that by using the format diskette option from Windows or you can get the needed data on websites, for free.

If the hard drive has now been repaired, by using the MaxLLF program you should try to boot windows and check what important files are missing. Then, you can search for a program, which is able to undelete the files you lost. It also is recommended that you save the important data on a CD or DVD and then completely format the hard disk. A fresh installed operating system is also important after the MBR has been formatted and repaired.

If this doesn’t work, don’t try experimenting to recover your data, because you might lose it forever. You should look for a data recovery company and let the experts do the job!