Partition Recovery™
An expert tool for recovering lost partitions
An expert tool for recovering lost partitions
Last updated: Sep 26, 2023

How to Fix a Crashed Hard Drive on Your Own

What do you do if your hard drive crashes? It is a widespread question and it doesn't matter: PC or a laptop, HDD or SSD.

The only matter is: how to fix damaged hard disk?

Here is the desired solution!

In this article, you will find out how to deal with all these problems.

Are you ready? Let's read!

Physical hard drive crash

There are three main causes of physical hard disk failure:

  • Extremely high temperatures. If there is insufficient cooling, thermal damage to the internal hard disk (and not only that!) may occur. Therefore, make sure that the air filters are clean and have good airflow.
  • Water entering the components of the hard disk, as they are very sensitive to moisture.
  • Collison. This can happen, for example, when a laptop is dropped or used carelessly.

In addition, the following symptoms will help you to recognize physical damage:

  • The computer's operating system cannot recognize the hard disk.
  • A continuous noise emanates from inside your computer. However, you need to be able to distinguish between the noise of a damaged disk and fan noise. In the event of a physical breakdown of the disk, you will hear something like a buzzing, crashing sound. The fan emits more a monotonous quiet or not-so-quiet sound.

If these symptoms are present in your hard drive and it is not detected by your computer anymore, then you are dealing with physical damage to the hard drive and you have no choice but to take it to a recovery center.

Logical hard drive crash

Logical failure has nothing to do with physical damage.

In this case, your hard disk works without interruption, but the operating system does not have access to the data. You can fix a bad hard drive with logical errors, and there are many more ways to do this. In addition, most often this can be done without even leaving your home.

The main causes of logical failure:

  • virus attack or damage to the hard disk by malware
  • human factors (e.g., sudden deletion, formatting partition)

With a logical hard drive failure, you may see the infamous blue screen, and you may also notice that the computer’s performance has drastically decreased or some of the data has disappeared.

So how do you fix a crashed hard drive? What is the solution?

Software for restoring files from a crashed logical disk

The first thing to do is to recover the data, and only then proceed to repair the hard disk. If you do the opposite, most likely you will lose some data or the entire contents of the hard disk.

Do you want such an outcome of events? Of course not! Therefore, let's deal with the recovery of information first.

For this, you need good professional software. And the best is DiskInternals Partition Recovery. This software tool works on each hard disk partition separately and can do deep data scanning (due to rebuilding the file system of the disk inside of the program).

The tool supports the following file systems: FAT12, ReFS, UFS, HFS, NTFS, ReiserFS, Reiser4, XFS, Ext2/3/4, etc. With the free preview function, you can be completely sure of the final result.

Download the free trial version of DiskInternals Partition Recovery before you buy a license and see how easy it is to use when the recovery wizard helps you at all stages of the process.

Recover files from a crashed disk

Instructions for recovering data from a hard disk using DiskInternals Partition Recovery:

  1. 1. Download and install DiskInternals Partition Recovery.
Install DiskInternals Partition Recovery on your PC.
  1. 2. The recovery wizard starts automatically. You only need to select the logical disk and the recovery mode: “reader”, “unerase” or “recovery”. It is recommended to choose the recovery mode (full recovery), since that is what you want to do now. Click Next.
Partition Recovery - select the crashed hard drive.
  1. 3. Scan. This process will take some time. Relax for a while, and the goal will be achieved.
Partition recovery wizard - scanning.
  1. 4. Preview. Right-click on the file and select "Preview in New Window." Recovery will occur automatically.
  1. 5. Preservation. To do this, you just need to purchase a license and enter the license key. No rescan and no reinstall required! It is better to save the recovered documents in another safe place to protect yourself from overwriting with new data.

How to fix the crashed hard drive?

There are two in-build tools in Windows for failed/crashed/corrupted logical disk. Both of them will damage your data, so that is why you need to save it first.

The first and the most common is chkdsk. Read Action 5. Fix a corrupted hard drive in Windows 7, 8, or 10.

Another good method includes file system formation. Read Action 6. how to fix a corrupted hard disk with the file system change.

Learn more about crashed hard drive recovery.

Instead of P.S.:

What do you do when hard drive crashes? How do you revive a hard drive?

We hope these questions have been completely answered after reading this article. If not, you can always contact DiskInternals support. You will receive detailed advice as soon as possible.

Good Luck!

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