We have all been there. You are minding your own business, working on your computer, and suddenly the dreaded “blue screen of death” appears. You try to read the instructions on the screen, but all you can make out is “catastrophic failure” and a bunch of hexadecimal numbers telling you that something you will never understand has failed. Unfortunately, your hard drive has crashed.

What do you do? Many people will take the easy route and choose to scream, cry, and possibly throw dishes at the wall. As emotionally satisfying as this course of action might be, it will not do anything to solve the predicament that you are now in. Your pictures, financial documents, music, videos, programs, and other precious files are stuck on that hard drive and there is not a thing you can do about it. Or is there?

First of all, it is not that big of a deal because you backed all of your important files up, just in case, right? Wait, are you telling me that you only have one copy of each of those important, irreplaceable files? Shame on you! But, all is not lost. There are ways to repair the drive, or, in the case of a major failure, recovering the data before getting a new hard drive.

When a hard drive goes bad, there are multiple levels of failure. The operating system could be corrupted. A virus might have scrambled the system. Or the worst case, the hard drive might be physically damaged. In each of these situations, steps can be taken to repair the damage or recover the inaccessible data.

If the operating system is corrupted, most computers have a recovery tool that will allow you to start from a previous backup point. If you have never done a system backup, that point will likely be the factory defaults. Not to worry, the tools usually have a file recovery function where files that have not been backed up can be saved before the system goes to the recover point. The file backup will require some sort of removable media to hold the files (since the hard drive is being repaired, the files must be stored somewhere else). A removable hard drive that can plug in to a USB port would be perfect for this. If the system does not have a recovery tool, you may have to use the recovery disk that came with the system. If you did not keep this disk (once again, shame on you!) most computer repair shops can do the job for you.

If the computer has a virus, it can usually be booted in “safe mode.” This will boot the operating system in stages, bypassing the infected section and allowing you to remove the virus from the computer. Most virus infections have extensive information on the Internet. Find a working computer and look up the removal instructions for the virus and you should be able to get your computer working again.

If the hard drive has physically gone bad, computer repair shops and hard drive recovery services have tools to recover the data. The drives are rarely repairable, but your data can often be saved and migrated to a new hard drive.

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