Not in the Hiram, GA area and need to recover files on your harddrive? No problem! Just read through this post and learn how you can do it from home!

One thing most people don’t know about “dead hard drives” is that in my experience 90% of the time or better the hard drive is not actually dead. It more than likely just has a problem with the Windows boot sequence and all the data is still recoverable. The only trouble comes in getting laptop hard drive data. This is because there is difficulty in getting the hard drive out of the laptop and into another computer. There is a special converting tool that allows you to connect either PATA or SATA hard drives via USB to another computer. If it you have a desktop hard drive then all you would have to do is plug the hard drive into the mother board and power supply, while the PC is off, and make sure the jumper settings are set to slave. When you turn on your computer you should see another hard drive in My Computer (probably drive letter E:). After you get your laptop hard drive or desktop hard drive you can navigate to your profile folder and copy and paste the data onto your working hard drive. From there you can either try to run a chkdsk /r from the Windows Recovery Console or just format the hard drive and reinstall Windows and all your applications. That is sometimes a good option especially if your computer was moving rather slow.

A former manager of mine had two sayings about saving your data, “Save often and frequently,” and ”Always have a backup of a backup of a backup.” Yes, it is redundant, but only to get the message across. There is nothing worse than the feeling of losing all of your pictures, music, documents, etc…  It is of the utmost importance to have either a second hard drive or a flash drive that you can back up your data on. Storage is becoming cheaper by the day. An internal 1 terabyte (~1000 GB) hard drive goes for $80 on www.newegg.com. I purchased a 2 GB flash drive from Microcenter for $7 a few weeks ago. There are many options to backing up your files. It will be way more expensive to pay someone to recover the data than it will be to purchase more disk space.

If you live in the areas of Dallas, Hiram, Villa Rica, or Douglasville then you should be able to find a back up hard drive at Wal Mart, Best Buy, or any local computer parts store with a store front.