If you can still boot the laptop/desktop and can access the data you want to preserve, try to copy it over to an external drive or a cloud backup service. If your PC and/or hard drive is failing, you want to minimize your usage to maximize your odds of getting your critical data off before it dies. By that I mean stop everything except your data recovery effort, and ideally read this guide on a separate PC or phone. Importantly, before you start, minimize how much you use the PC or write data to the hard drive. You need to act fast if you want to save or recover data from it. If your laptop or desktop PC has a hard drive that seems to be having problems, either because you're seeing strange error messages, you're experiencing crashes or Blue Screens of Death in Windows that you think are drive-related, or you can simply no longer boot the machine, there's a chance your hard drive is corrupted or failing. (Image credit: Future) Recover data from a faulty hard drive in Windows Just be aware that not every file the app finds can be recovered - it'll tell you whether or not there's enough left to salvage. Reputable file recovery apps like Recuva can give you a little extra help finding deleted files on your hard drive(s). Your hard drive(s) are usually listed under the 'This PC' menu, and if you have multiple drives you'll want to run a search on each one! Note that you need to make sure your PC's hard drive is selected in the left-hand sidebar. Next, open File Explorer (it's on your taskbar by default, but you can also find it by pressing Win + E), type the name of the file you're looking for in the search field in the upper-right corner and hit Enter. Open the Recycle Bin ( hit the Windows key and type 'recycle bin', then hit Enter when it appears in the search results) and look around to make sure the the file(s) you're after aren't there.

First, double-check your files to ensure that the one(s) you're looking for aren't lurking somewhere in the bowels of your PC. We've covered all of this in our guide on how to use System Restore in Windows.ġ. However, any files you've added since you made the last restore point will be wiped when restoring to it, so it's good practice to enable System Restore and create restore points regularly. Restoring to a system image is a great way to recover files you may have accidentally deleted. Windows has a great utility called System Restore, which creates a system image on a regular basis (if you have it enabled - unfortunately, it's disabled by default). How to recover data from a hard drive Recover deleted data from a hard drive in Windows

Data recovery software for large files