Q: My hard drive recently broke because of a power outage to my system (throwing the hard drive out of sync or something). It will NO LONGER boot to the OS and so I cannot accept any answer regarding action from the OS. So is there a way to back my hard drive up from outside of the OS? Also, I would prefer just recovering a few files (A Sony Vegas file I have been editing and the files that were being edited). It's actually nice to get a new hard drive (blank) because so i can get a new start, without all those computer problems I have been having in the past. So basically, I would much rather only recover files of my selection, recovered outside of the operating system. Is this possible? Thanks. My system is a Dell Inspiron 1501
A: First you need to find out whether the circuitry of the drive is damaged or if only data was corrupted by the outage. Go into System setup (press F2 when the Dell logo appears) and see if it recognizes your drive. If it doesn't, then it may be a problem. In any case, like you said, get a new hard drive first. Install the OS on the new drive. Now, to recover the files from the old drive, the easier way is to get an external hard drive enclosure for it. I like the Vantec ones (check out the Newegg link below). Then plug in it and see if the computer sees it and if it can open the drive and browse the folders. If it doesn't recognize the drive, the drive may be shot. If it recognizes the drive, but you can't browse the folders, then the drive may just be corrupted. You will need to buy software like R-Studio (link below) to recover your files. It'll be up to you to see if it's worth it. Hope this helps.