Summary:
Many factors lead to hard drive corruption due to which your important data becomes inaccessible. If you are looking out for a solution to recover data from a corrupted hard drive without formatting the drive, you are on the right track. Follow the article to know the causes and symptoms of the corrupted hard drive and the easiest way to perform corrupted hard drive recovery.
If you are in a situation where you are trying to open your important file and you notice that your drive cannot be accessed, it means your hard drive is corrupted. Not only issues with accessibility, but you might also encounter a few error messages indicating the file organization system on the hard disk is corrupted.
How do I know if my hard drive is corrupted?
Here are some of the common symptoms of the corrupted hard drive
- Drive reading invalid media type.
- File system displayed as RAW.
- Error asking you to format the drive – disk not formatted. Do you want to format now?
- File names appear with unusual characters.
- Pop – up message stating that “Sector not found.”
- “You need to format the disk drive before you can use it.”
If you encounter any above mentioned or any such errors, it should be understood that your drive is corrupted.
Note: Immediately stop using the corrupted hard drive. This is recommended because the data on the corrupted hard drive might get overwritten and this reduces the chance of complete recovery of data from the corrupted hard drive.
Why is my hard drive corrupted?
There are many reasons for hard drive corruption; the common reasons are discussed below:
Damaged File System
The file system of an operating system manages and organizes files on the storage device. If the file system on the internal hard drive gets corrupted, the complete disk becomes inaccessible.
Virus Attack
It is the most common reason behind hard disk corruption. Did you know that a certain range of viruses called boot sector virus can directly affect the master boot record which is essential for the booting of your computer? These viruses not only corrupt your system files but also the hard drive.
Corrupt Boot Sector
If the boot sector gets damaged, you might not be able to start your computer and your internal HDD data will become inaccessible.
Physical damage:
Any physical damage to the hard drive leads to hard disk corruption. It is generally caused when the hardware gets crashed due to overheating of HDD, Read Write head crash, poor contact data line, magnetic platter scratches, a short circuit in the control circuit board, sudden power failures, etc.
How to retrieve data from a corrupted hard drive?
It is always rewarding to keep the backup of your important files. If you have the recent backup available, then the crisis can be handled better and data can easily be restored.
If you have no backups, there is no point in regretting now. You can easily recover data from corrupt hard disks using a safe and trusted hard drive recovery tool.
Note: You can fix your unallocated hard drive using the advice in this article and learn how to recover data from unallocated hard drive.
However, with the help of an effective tool such as SFWare Hard drive Recovery software, the data recovery is a lot safer and much easier. Despite being corrupt or completely inaccessible, SFWare hard drive recovery uses advanced algorithms that are capable of accessing each and every sector of the drive to recover its data. Since the tool bypasses the corruption in drives, it is worth a try, download the tool now…
Steps to recover data from the corrupted hard disk
Download and install the SFWare hard drive recovery tool. Launch the application. If your SATA drive is corrupted, click on the link to know SATA hard drive recovery briefly.
- Select the Drive/ Partition Recovery option from the main screen and select the drive to perform corrupt hard disk recovery.
- The scanning process initializes. After the completion of the scanning process, recovered files from your corrupt hard drive are displayed.
- You can use either Data View or File Type View to navigate through the recovered corrupted drive files
- If you wish to pause and resume this recovery session later, save the recovery session with the help of the Save Recovery Session option. Select the files and choose the destination folder to save the files.
Caution: It is not advised to save the recovered files on the same corrupt hard drive.
Once, you recover your important files from the corrupted hard drive, if you want to know How to fix a corrupt files manually. Click on the link and know the easy ways to fix the corrupt drives without any complication.
Precautionary Measures to keep your data safe on the hard drive
- Take regular backups of the data
- Keep system drivers, software and installers updated
- Maintain your computer hardware and keep it healthy
- Install anti-virus and firewalls on your system for better protection
- Avoid too many power fluctuations to the system
- Never perform forced shutdown on the system