How to Recover Data from Dead Hard Drive?

Updated on June 04, 2022

Years of your work and information lost because your hard disk is dead? If you are wondering on how to get your data from dead hard drive, do not worry, using one of the best reliable hard drive recovery software, it is possible to recover from dear hard disk.

Dead Hard Drive could be the result of either mechanical components breakdown or logical issues related to the drive. Data Lost may be due to physical or logical damage, your hours of efforts are lost. If the damage that caused your hard drive to be dead is physical, all you need to do is replace the hard disk.

How a Hard Drive Becomes Dead or Damaged?

Here are a few reasons why a hard drive can become dead or damaged:

Physical damage – Hard drives are made of moving parts, any physical damage on the drive can make your hard drive dead.

Data corruption – Corruption is a form of logical damage. Corruption can occur to individual files, as well as the entire file system. If a file system becomes corrupted, your hard drive won’t know how to access your data, making it unreadable.

Malware attack – Malware, like viruses, comes in many forms. In some cases, it can attack your files or format your entire drive.

How Do I Know if My Hard Drive is failing?

The most common indications of the dead hard drive are listed below:

1. Your computer starts freezing when you access files stored on the drive. Computer takes long time to respond when it is frozen. This can be verified by restarting. If you again encounter freezing of the computer while accessing data, the indication is your dive might fail soon.


2. Your drive is slow at processing data or taking prolonged boot time and your computer is getting slow day by day, it is an early indication to know that your drive may die any day.


3. As mentioned earlier, mechanical damage on the drive such as crashes on head leads to no read and write actions on the drive. You can observe the physical damage on the drive by hearing the noise the drive makes while running. It is usually a clicking noise.


4. Electrical issues or improper operating conditions can also lead your drive to die.

If you are wondering, is it possible to get your data back from a dead hard drive and how would you do that, here is an answer.

Can I Recover Data from A Dead (External) Hard Drive?

Yes, it is possible to recover data from the dead hard dive. You can restore data from dead hard drive until components of the drive functions. To do so, all you need is a safe and trusted hard drive recovery tool.

Note: Typically, a dead hard drive doesn’t respond when you try to boot the computer. Even if the system boots, the drive makes unusual noise in middle and stops abruptly. you can’t access the hard drive further! The drive must be detected at least in Bios. By this way it the drive could be recognized when trying to connect it on another computer for recovery.

SFWare hard drive recovery tool is one best tool with the most efficient search algorithm scans the entire dead hard drive and restores files and folders from it in less span of time. The tool can recover data from dead hard drive without altering the original file names and directory structures. Therefore, the integrity of the data is unaltered.

The tool also helps to restore data from corrupt hard drive, repartitioned disk, formatted/reformatted drive, unbootable hard drive, deleted, lost or inaccessible partition, and more.

How to Recover Data from Dead Hard Disk?

Download and Install SFWare Data Recovery tool on your computer. Connect your dead hard drive as a secondary drive to a working Windows computer. Launch the software. (If you are trying to recover data from dead external hard disk, connect your external hard drive to a healthy computer and follow the steps. Using this method, can also recover data from your Laptop hard drive.)

• Step 1: From the main screen, click on Drive/Partition Recovery.

• Step 2: Next, click on the dead drive from which you want to recover data.

• Step 3: This initiates the scanning process. After the completion of scanning, all the recoverable files are listed in Data Type or File Type View.

• Step 4: Preview the files selected files for recover. If you are satisfied with the results Save them on your computer.



The software not only supports recovery from dead hard drive, but also supports data recovery from various hard drive interfaces such as SATA, SCSI, IDE, etc. The tool also supports data recovery from flash memory cards, external USB drives, external hard disks, iPods, FireWire drives, and other storage devices.

Precautionary Note About Hard Drive Failure:

• It is always recommended to perform formatting/reformatting, reinstallation or partitioning of hard drives carefully. And, never forget to backup important data saved on your hard drive; especially when the drive exhibits any indication that it is nearing failure. If you fail to take backup of the data, you can make use of the SFWare hard drive recovery tool to retrieve data from any formatted/ reformatted drives.
• Master Boot Record corruption, registry file corruption, the presence of more bad sectors on a hard disk, improper installation/upgrading of an operating system, wrong formatting/reformatting of drive etc. are the common reasons for the failure of hard disk drives.
• As mentioned in the earlier section, the symptoms like slow startup/slow processing speed, the computer hangs every now and then, files take a long time to load etc. Then, eventually the hard drive may die, and you lose access to your files and folders present in it.