DIY recovery may be possible, however, if your data is valuable, you should consider
if you want to experiment with recovery in the midst of problems. If you want to
try - here are a few items you should consider.
- Remove the suspect hard disk from the computer as soon as practical, and install
into a USB drive adapter. Image the drive to another Hard Disk and perform recovery
only on the Image, that will protect the date on the problem drive
- If you suspect a problem is on the boot drive you should stop using the computer
or laptop immediately and seek advice. The boot process writes to the boot drive,
this can further compromise the drive. Do not install any recovery or other software
to attempt to diagnose the boot drive.
- Data Recovery Software is available on the Internet or in stores - make sure you
fully follow instructions - never install the software onto a problem drive.
- If multiple partitions exist on the hard disk - make sure you recover all partitions
- Do not use CHKDSK / Defrag or any other hard disk optimizations tools - they may
overwrite your data or reallocate bad sectors and reduce the ability to perform
data recovery.
- Check your recovered data for errors or corruption, open and view all recovered
data files. Do not rely on thumbnails or previews, these may appear fine even if
the main file is corrupt.
- Application program files (executables) and Operating System should not be recovered
- you should re-install (program errors it may not become become obvious for some
time but any opened files may get corrupted)
DO NOT reuse or write to a problematic drive until you are sure you have recovered
all of your information. . Many data files can not be repaired after a recovery,
original media must be kept to allow for further recovery attempts with different
tools or software.