How to Recover Crashed External Hard Disk Data?

 

External hard drives are one of the fastest selling computer accessories in the market because of its large storage capacity, portability, flexibility and so on. External hard drives can be used as an emergency back up devices to store important files, images, music, videos so that you can quickly get back the data when internal hard drive of the computer becomes nonfunctional. Like any other data storage devices external hard drives are also prone to data loss under certain circumstances like external hard drive crash. Losing important files from external hard disk due to crash is a heart braking experience. But no need to worry about how to recover crashed external hard drive data, you can efficiently restore data from external hard disk with the help of file recovery application.

When the external hard drive crashes files disappear from external hard drive without any signs, file system of the external hard drive turns RAW and you cannot access the data stored on the drive, external hard disk makes clicking and grinding sounds and the drive is not recognizable in the disk management window. But in some cases you can recognize the drive but the data stored on the drive cannot be accessed and various error messages pops up when you connect the external drive to the system. If you want to recover data from Iomega external drive, then the most appropriate way is here - https://www.externalharddrivefilerecovery.com/data-from-iomega.html.

Causes for External Hard Drive Crash:

External hard drives may crash due to logical and mechanical problems which include

Improper handling of device: Due to the portability of external devices there are higher chances of device being dropped. When you drop the device the disk head of the device may move which could scratch the disk platter or damage the head itself. Damaged interior components of the device may cause external hard drive to crash making it non functional.

Extreme weather conditions: Exposure of external hard disk to extreme hot or cold conditions, inadequate cooling or ventilation in and around the external hard drive may overheat it increasing the chances of crash.

Aging of hardware: More usage of the external hard disk increases the chances of crash. “The older your drive is, the more likely it is to crash”. Heavy usage increases the wear rate of the drive leading to crash. More usage of external hard drive increases the bad sectors on the drive. As the number of bad sectors increases the storage capacity of the drive decreases and also the data stored on these bad sectors cannot be accessed.

File system corruption: File system keeps track of data stored on the External hard drive. It organizes the data in proper way so that it can be accessed easily. If the file system of the external hard drive gets corrupted then you may lose access to the data stored on the device. File system of the external hard drive gets corrupted due to virus attack, frequent power outages, improper system shut down of system when the external hard drive is connected to the system. Severe file system corruption may cause the external hard disk to crash. If you encountered any of these situations, you may need to format your external hard drive, to use it once again for data storage. However, you can solve this problem, using the best reocvery software since it can allow you to recover crashed external hard drive data without formatting & losing your important data.

Irrespective of the reason responsible for external hard drive crash you can easily recover the data from crashed device with the help of file recovery application. This tool can restore up to 300 file types including spread sheets, excel sheets, email archives, zip archives and other popular file types based on their unique signatures and it allows you to manually add or edit new signatures for the non listed files. You can recover data from corrupted external hard disk of various brands like Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung and so on. It can also restore files from memory cards, External USB drives, Fire Wire Drives, iPods and memory sticks etc. This award winning application can recover data from portable hard disk on Win XP, Windows 7 and Win Vista operating system. If you have lost the data while transferring from WD external hard drive to PC then you can make use of this application to restore WD My passport data. It also allows you to recover files from bad drive with few simple mouse clicks.

There are various Operating Systems that are present like Windows OS, Mac OS and so on. Mac Operating System has more advanced features than Windows operating system and hence all the tasks can be performed without much effort. There will be certain reasons that causes loss of files from Mac Operating System. Even files from external hard drive are also lost due to certain scenarios when the drive is connected to Mac operating system. Just go through this page to know more about how to recover files from Mac OS.

Steps to recover data from crashed external hard disk:

Step 1: Download and install the application on your system. After launching the application select “Recover Partitions/Drives” option as illustrated in Figure 1. From the next window select "Partition Recovery" option.

External Hard Drive File Recovery - Main Window

Figure 1: Home Screen

Step 2: A window pops up with the list of available system drives along with the devices connected to the system. Select crashed external hard drive and click “Next” to initiate recovery process as shown in Figure 2.

External Hard Drive File Recovery - Drive Selection Window

Figure 2: Select Drive

Step 3: After completion of recovery process list of files retrieved from crashed external hard disk will be displayed on the screen as shown in Figure 3. Select the required file and save to secured location.

External Hard Drive File Recovery - Preview Window

Figure 3: Preview Recovered Files

For Leopard (10.5) and
Snow Leopard (10.6) Users

For Lion (10.7) and
Mountain Lion (10.8) & Mavericks Users