How to Recover Hard Drive by Tricking the Operating System

If you have are facing a screen that says, "No boot device found" you may have a failing hard drive. When the drive doesn't show up in the BIOS list of drives, you know you are in for trouble.

First, the system area is a portion of the drive's platter where drive tolerances and other details are stored. This area is invisible to computer users and can only be accessed in a special "engineering" mode. When this system area becomes corrupt, the hard disk doesn't show up during the Power On Self Test and you get an error that says, "No boot device found."

To trick the operating system into bypassing this system area and reading your data, you will need an exact duplicate of your original hard disk. This can be pricey depending on the type of disk drive you have. The new drive must be completely identical including the same exact brand, same exact storage capacity, same exact model, and same exact firmware version.

While shopping for the drive, pick up a switchable power/IDE cable, drive imaging software, and data recovery software. Now, connect both drives to the cable and switch the power to the new drive. Boot your PC and watch as the Power On Self Test recognizes the new hard drive. Once it's recognized and the operating system loads, switch the power over to the crashed drive and trick both the BIOS and the operating system. They won't know the difference once the system is fully booted.

Now, use the drive imaging software to clone the bad drive to the new drive. After cloning the drive (which could take several hours), shut down your system and disconnect the bad disk drive. Reassemble your PC and reboot.

Use the data recovery software to "tree" the cloned drive. Now, copy all of your data onto a new drive.

This way how to recover harddrive has its downsides however. In addition to the hands-on work and the expense of buying multiple drives, the cloned drive may also have cloned corruption and other bad files from the original failing drive. Consider installing the operating system, all program files, and your recovered data onto a brand new drive in order to work around these potential problems.

How to recover hard drive issues can be tricky. Fortunately, you don't always have to open your case and swap out drives unless you are a techie type who likes to do-it-yourself. Many data recovery utilities can work wonders.