Recover Data From a Hard Drive that Does Not Boot Up

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Under some circumstances, your computer hard drive may refuse to boot up when you start your system. After you boot the system using bootable floppy disk, the hard drive can be seen or accessed through disk utility programs such as FDISK in Windows. In such situations, the drive can not be accessed directly and the stored data remains inaccessible. This behavior of hard drive leads to critical data loss situations. In order to extract lost data from affected computer hard disk drive, data recovery solutions are required.

Grounds of the issue-

Generally, if the hard drive can be detected by your system BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) setup and can be accessed after booting through a floppy disk, the problem is with software components of your system. The most common problem is the boot sector or MBR (Master Boot Record) virus. The problem may also occur if the hard drive structure is damaged and it requires formatting to be accessed. Always create a complete backup of your hard drive before formatting it, as disk formatting removes all data from the drive and cause critical data loss situations.

Resolution-

You can try out following things to fix this problem:

• Try rebooting your system. A hard boot may help you to start the system properly.

• Throughly scan the hard drive using an updated and effective anti-virus software. Some deadly boot sector viruses may make your system unbootable. When you boot the system using floppy disk, it bypasses virus and hard drive become visible.

• Make sure that your boot partition is set as 'active'. Otherwise the system partition can not boot up.

• The problem may be due to damaged boot sector or any other important data structure, format the hard drive and reinstall operating system.

• While setting up a multi-boot configuration, you need to put a bootable partition as first partition of the hard drive. Setting up this partition as active might not be enough.

If none of the above methods work or you format the hard drive, data loss situations arise. In such cases, you need Data Recovery Software to handle the situations.

The Data Recovery applications are powerful enough to completely scan the affected drive and extract all lost data from it. With self-descriptive and graphical user interface, they allow you perform data recovery on your own.