How to Recover Files from a Corrupted Hard Drive?

Corrupted hard drive Symptoms

Have you ever come across the problem of a corrupted hard drive? When a hard drive is corrupted, you are no longer able to use it although it does show as a disk. And you also encounter the following typical symptoms:

Invalid media type reading drive.
Abort, Retry, Fail?
The file system is displayed as "RAW".
Windows may ask if you want to format the drive by warning "disk not formatted. Do you want to format now?"
File names contain "weird" characters.
"Sector not found" messages.
A corrupted hard drive always contains important files and folders, how to get data back from it? Is there a useful method to repair hard disk without losing data? Yes. Send it to a specialist shop and it is going to cost you a bomb to retrieve, save, recover and extract all your data. So the best choice is to recover files from the corrupted drive with data recovery software. The hard disk recovery software - EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard can recover files from cases of deleted, formatted and corrupted hard drive.

How to recover files from a corrupted/crashed hard drive?

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard has a user-friendly interface for you to recover files from the corrupted hard drive, including all the popular brands like SanDisk, Samsung, Western Digital, etc. If you cannot boot computer after hard drive was corrupted, you can create WinPE bootable CD/DVD of EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to recover lost data.

This software also supports all Windows such as Widows 10/8/7 etc, allowing you to fully restore lost Windows files such as to recover deleted files from Windows 8.

Step 1. Launch EaseUS data recovery software, select the corrupted hard drive and click "Scan" to search for all the lost and existing files.

Recover files from a corrupted hard drive - select to scan the specific disk

Step 2. A quick scan will start first. After it completed, a deep scan will automatically launch in order to find more files.

Recover files from a corrupted hard drive - run quick scan and deep scan

Step 3. After the scan, choose the lost data and click "Recover" button to retrieve them back from corrupted hard drive. Here, you'd better save all the recovered files on a different drive or device in case of data recovery failure.

Recover files from a corrupted hard drive

How to fix or repair corrupted hard disk drive?

After restoring lost files from corrupted hard disk drive, how to deal with the corrupted hard disk? Let it go? Just give it up? Nope! Here below, we'll provide you a few tips for you to try and repair corrupted hard disk drive:

Tip 1. Run CHKDSK to repair corrupted hard disk drive

If the hard disk drive has bad sectors or internal errors, the hard disk can corrupt very easily. And if you know how to run CHKDSK command in your PC, it will be very easy for you to fix hard disk corrupted issue. Let's see how to run CHKDSK and repair corrupted hard disk drive now:

Press Win + X, select Command Prompt (Admin);
Click Yes to launch Command Prompt as Administrator;
Type: chkdsk and hit Enter to check errors in corrupted hard drive;
Type: chkdsk D: /f /r/x to let CHKDSK fix the drive; (D is the drive letter of your corrupted hard drive);
If the target drive is a boot disk, the system will ask you if you want to run the command before the next boot. Type: yes and hit Enter to restart the computer. The command will run before the operating system loads, allowing it to gain full access to the disk and repair corrupted drive.

Tip 2. Run a thorough disk check to fix corrupted hard disk

Open This PC or Computer, right-click hard drive and select Properties;
Click Tools > Tab Error checking > Click Check now;
Select Check local disk and click Start;
Close all running and open programs, select the option to let system check upon the next boot;
After this, restart PC.
If it reports that your drive has 'bad sectors or clusters', don't worry. CHKDSK command in Tip one will fix this issue.

Tip 3. Repair corrupted system drive from Control Panel

Press Win + X, select Control Panel;
Click System and Security > Tab Action Center > Expand Maintenance and click Run Scan;
Click Restart;
Tip 4. Use File Manger to fix corrupted non-system drive

Press Win + E to open File Manager, right-click the appropriate drive from the left pane;
Select Properties and click Tools > click Check under Error Checking;
Click Repair This Drive when the scan completes fixing the drive errors.
After all these steps, you've successfully recovered data from corrupted hard drive and fix corrupted hard disk issue. Now you can reuse the hard disk drive to store and save data again. If you are facing a similar problem on your corrupted hard drive, external hard drive or USB etc storage devices, don't worry. Just follow this article to get your problem fixed without losing any data now.