Summary: Your internal hard drive can sometimes show signs of fatigue or even sudden failure. It is for this reason that it is important to know how to recover data from your damaged hard drives. In this article, we show you the various ways to do this.
It’s a fact, hard drives don’t last forever. That’s why you should always plan for the worst. And while data recovery can sometimes be complex in the case of physical degradation of hard drives, in other cases it will be much easier. This is the first case, perhaps one of the most common. Your computer does not start anymore and you want to recover your data? So here is the solution.
Expert Tip: One of the best ways to recover data from dead, crashed, or failed hard disk is run data recovery to extract lost photos, videos and audio files.

Use Hard Disk Data Recovery Software (Free & Professional)
The first solution is to use professional and free data recovery software. iBoysoft Data Recovery is one of the best hard drive data recovery software designed to retrieve digital media files from dead, crashed or failing hard drive in Windows and Mac as this software is available separately for Windows and Mac computers. This free tool makes Windows data recovery fast and comes with advanced scanning algorithms that efficiently extract lost, missing or inaccessible data from hard disks. iBoysoft Data Recovery can not only recover photos and videos but also restore audio files of various file formats.
With the use of iBoysoft Data Recovery Tool, you can:
- Recover inaccessible or lost pictures, videos and audio files of various formats from dead, corrupted, or failed hard drives or SSDs.
- Also recover data from Windows or Mac internal or external hard drive data.
- Support all brands of hard disks manufactured by PNY, Transcend, Toshiba, Samsung 850 Pro, SanDisk G26 Plus, Crucial, WD, ADATA, Kingston, etc.
- 100% read-only. Safe, secure and easy to use.

Boot on a USB Stick or CD
Start (boot) your PC on a live USB key or a live CD. You can, especially if you don’t have one, burn a Linux version, or install a Linux version on your USB stick, for free. This will allow you to access a brand-new operating system which will allow you to benefit from an interface.
From this interface, you can copy each of your data and therefore recover all or part of your data deemed important. This is still the best way to recover any data from a PC that does not start anymore.
Take out Your Internal Hard Drive from the PC
Another scenario: not only does your PC not start, but a component or a problem means that you cannot recover data from this PC either. The screen may be broken, the keyboard unusable, or the motherboard defective. So many reasons that will force you to remove your hard drive to place it in a healthy medium.
This solution remains quite simple. The idea is to access your hard drive through a route other than your primary operating system. you will need to remove the hard drive from your PC, stationary or laptop. This will allow it to be connected to another support such as a docking station, a PC tower, or even to place it in an external box.
Call a Data Recovery Expert
If neither of these two solutions works, which is very rare, the last possibility is to ask for help from data recover specialists. Your hard drives will stay in the laboratory where experienced professionals will find a way to recover some or all of your data. The procedure then is much more complex and sometimes costs several hundred euros. But the recovery of your information is guaranteed. In the case of a damaged hard drive, this will often be the only option.
Conclusion
In short, there are four possibilities to recover your data on an internal hard drive. While the second and third are still accessible to you, the first and last will often involve outside help. The intervention of professional data recovery software and specialists will allow you to save most of your data. Hence the usefulness of performing regular backups on different media, or even clouds.