How Do You Recover From Hard Disk Failure?
Hard disk failures (or theft) are almost as inevitable as death and taxes. You may get lucky and never experience one, but chances are if you are reading this, the event is upon you. If you have critical data backed up, the experience will not be traumatic, and replacement drives are relatively inexpensive. Here are some suggestions for how to approach a failure with specific references to Windows operating systems. Most important: Do not panic and start hitting keys and doing things before you think the crash through and do some basic diagnostics. If the machine will not boot at all from the hard drive, even in safe mode, locate the emergency boot, system mirror and recovery disks that either came with the machine or that you made when you got it. Alternatively, if you have it, locate the operating system disk. Boot the machine from one of these options. Determine whether the failure is a result of complete mechanical breakdown. If it is, it is not worth trying to rescue the drive you
