Hard drive crashed, now what?

Hard drives are mechanical devices. That goes for both the external drive you connect to your PC and the built-in drives. The housing contains discs that resemble CD discs. These are read by a header. Compare that head with the needle of a record player from the past. The head and the discs can break, for example by frequent impacts. The hard drive has then crashed. But often it is still possible to retrieve data from the disk. And a completely new computer is not always necessary. If the rest is still fine, you can have a new hard drive installed.

But first of all: prevention is better than cure. Therefore, always backup your important data and precious photos. If you have a backup copy of all the digital information that is important to you, a crash can’t really affect you. On our site you will find numerous articles and tips about making backups.

Those who create a backup IP don’t really have to worry about recovery options whose chances of success are unclear. But if it is necessary to retrieve data from a crashed hard drive: you cannot do this yourself. In the event of a hard drive crash (internal or external), the drive is physically broken. But experts can still extract data from a drive in such a case. That is of course not free. One of the companies specialized in data recovery is Digirec Data Recovery. They work on a ‘no cure no pay’ basis, so you only pay if they manage to save data from your drive.