If your drive is failing right now, read this section and act. The rest of the article can wait.
Stop using it. Power it down. Do not run repair tools.
Every additional minute a failing drive spends running reduces what can be recovered from it. If it's making unusual noises, power it off immediately and don't turn it back on.
The first ten minutes
1. Determine whether you have a backup.
If yes, this is an inconvenience, not a disaster. Skip to the recovery section below.
If no, everything that follows matters, and the decisions you make in the next hour determine the outcome.
2. Stop writing to the drive.
Close applications. Don't save anything. Don't install recovery software onto the affected drive — installing anything writes data and can overwrite exactly what you're trying to recover.
3. Identify the type of failure.
Mechanical — clicking, grinding, beeping, whirring that stops and restarts, or a drive that isn't detected at all. The drive's physical components have failed. Power it off and leave it off. Software will not help and running it causes further physical damage.
Logical — the drive is detected and spins normally, but files are missing, folders are empty, the drive asks to be formatted, or the system reports corruption. The hardware may be fine; the file system is damaged. Software recovery has a reasonable chance here.
Degrading — mostly works but is slow, throws occasional errors, or files intermittently won't open. This is the best case, because the drive is still readable. Copy your data off immediately, most important files first, and don't attempt any repair until you have.
Connection — not detected, but no unusual noises. Before assuming the worst, try a different cable, a different port, and a different computer. External drive enclosures fail more often than the drives inside them, and a failed enclosure looks identical to a failed drive.
What makes it worse
Running disk repair utilities. Repair tools write to the drive. On a physically failing drive, that both risks further damage and can overwrite recoverable data. On a logically damaged one, an aggressive repair can destroy the file system structures a recovery tool would have used.
Repeatedly powering it on. Each power cycle on a mechanically failing drive risks further damage.
Freezing it, hitting it, or opening it. These circulate as folk remedies. Freezing may occasionally produce a brief window of function, and it also introduces condensation. Opening a drive outside a clean environment contaminates the platters and eliminates the possibility of professional recovery.
Reformatting or reinstalling. Obvious, but it happens under pressure when a dialog offers it as the solution.
Continuing to use the computer. If the failing drive is the system drive, ongoing use writes constantly.
If you have a backup
Good. Proceed calmly.
- Don't restore onto the failing drive. Replace the hardware first.
- Verify the backup before wiping anything. Confirm you can read it and that it's recent. Now is exactly the wrong time to discover it's been failing for eight months.
- Check the backup's date and note what you've done since. Work since the last backup isn't in it.
- Try to recover the gap from the failing drive if it's still readable — the files changed since the last backup are the only ones you actually need from it.
- Restore to new hardware.
- Keep the old drive until you're certain everything is back. Don't dispose of it the same day.
Expect a full restore to take hours. Plan around it rather than watching it.
If you don't have a backup
Three options, in ascending order of cost.
Option 1: Copy what you can, right now
If the drive is still readable, this is the priority above all else. Not repairing it, not diagnosing it — copying.
Attach an external drive with enough space and copy in priority order:
- Photos and video of people
- Documents, financial records, contracts
- Current work
- Everything else
Copy the highest-priority material first, because the drive may fail completely partway through. Don't start with the biggest folder.
If the file system won't mount normally, connecting the drive to another computer as a secondary drive sometimes works when booting from it doesn't. An external enclosure or a drive adapter costs little and is worth having for exactly this.
Option 2: Recovery software
For logical failures where the drive is detected and functional. Data recovery tools scan for file structures and reconstruct what they find.
Critical rules:
- Install the software on a different drive, never the affected one
- Recover to a different drive, never the affected one
- Make a disk image first if the tool supports it — a byte-level copy of the whole drive. Then run recovery against the image, so the failing drive is only read once
- Don't run it on a mechanically failing drive. The scan takes hours of continuous operation, which is the worst thing you can do to failing hardware
Success rates are reasonable for accidentally deleted files and damaged file systems, and poor for physical damage.
Option 3: Professional recovery
For mechanical failures, and for anything genuinely irreplaceable.
Professional services open drives in clean rooms, replace failed components, and read platters directly. It is the only route that works for physical failure.
What to know:
It's expensive. Typically hundreds to thousands, depending on the failure. Get a quote before committing.
Reputable firms offer free evaluation and no-recovery-no-fee terms. Be wary of anyone requiring payment up front regardless of outcome.
Turnaround is days to weeks, with expedited options at a premium.
Success isn't guaranteed, though for mechanical failures on drives that haven't been tampered with, results are often better than people expect.
Don't let anyone open the drive who isn't a professional recovery service. A general computer repair shop opening a drive on a workbench eliminates the professional option.
The decision is straightforward arithmetic: what would it cost you, in money or in irreplaceable loss, not to have this data? For a decade of family photos, the answer is usually that it's worth it. For a work laptop whose contents exist on a server, it isn't.
Special cases
Solid state drives. SSDs fail differently — often suddenly and completely, with no warning noises. Recovery is harder and less often successful than with spinning drives, partly because of how they manage deleted data internally. If an SSD is showing errors, copy your data off immediately; there's often less warning than with a mechanical drive.
The drive is encrypted. You need the key or password to recover anything meaningful, and professional recovery services will need it too. Recovery without it is not possible. Make sure you know where your recovery key is before you need it.
It's the system drive. Remove it and connect it to another computer as a secondary drive rather than trying to boot from it. This avoids the operating system writing to it constantly.
It's a RAID or NAS. Stop. Don't rebuild the array, don't replace multiple drives, don't run any repair. RAID recovery is specialized and an incorrect rebuild can destroy data that was recoverable. Get professional advice.
After it's over
Once you're back, do these while the experience is fresh:
Set up a real backup. If this happened without one, that's the lesson, and it's cheaper than the alternative you just experienced.
Write down what you lost. Not to dwell on it — to know what to look for elsewhere, and to inform what you protect going forward.
Check the age of your other drives. If one drive from a batch failed, others may be close. Replace drives over three to five years old.
Dispose of the dead drive securely. Even a failed drive can contain readable data. Physically destroy it, or use a service that certifies destruction. Don't put it in the bin intact.
Test the new backup. Restore a file and open it.
The thing worth remembering
Drive failure isn't rare and it isn't a sign you did something wrong. Every drive fails eventually — that's a property of the hardware, not a fault of yours.
What separates a bad day from a catastrophe is entirely whether a second copy exists. If you're reading this in advance rather than in an emergency, that's the whole lesson.
Next in this series: How to Back Up Your Phone Completely