This morning I powered on my desktop only to be greeted by a weird noise, like that of a grinding mill. Further investigation led me to discover to my own dismay, that my hard drive was responsible for this new development.
If you are in same situation with me, what will you do? What will be your reaction when your hard drive start making strange and unpleasant noises? Could this be last days of your hard drive?
I’m afraid, indeed, this could be the last days of your hard drive. The first step to take is to power off your PC completely.
Of course, you will need to replace your hard drive with a new one, hence, the need to recover your files from the the spinning hard drive. If your hard drive (the old one) is still accessible, the process of recovery is relatively easier. USB adapters such IDE/SATA to USB Adapter can be used to copy data from your old hard drive to your new one.
A complete, up-to-date backup, or a cloud-based backup service can come quite handy in situations when your drive is inaccessible. Though much will depend on what type of backup you have.
If you have an image backup of your C: drive, you can restore that to the new drive and be up and working almost immediately. Whatever program you used to create the image should have a way for you to boot the computer and restore it.
If you backed up your data files separately, you’ll have to restore those separately, as well.
But what if you have your documents and other data files safely backed up, but never bothered to back up Windows itself? (As far as I know, an image is the only reliable way to back up Windows.) In that case, contact the computer manufacturer and find out how you can restore Windows to the new drive. Once that’s done, you’ll have to restore your programs.
If you do not have a backup, you can ask a skilled professional to clone the dying hard drive to the new one.
Cloning a hard drive is easy if you have done it before but for a novice, it could be a bit tricky. Some agents such as DriveSavers, Kroll OnTrack and Flashback Data offers reliable but expensive data recovery services.