Power Surge Caused Hard Drive Not To Be Recognized

Stupid maintenance man was "grounding" an electric outlet elsewhere without turning off the power and tripped something and my desktop went off. When it rebooted, it said the hard drive wasn't recognized and to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart, which I did and it still didn't work. I rebooted and hit F12 to run diagnostics and it gave hard drive error. I took the hard drive out, reconnected all the wires and got the same result. I took it out again and put it into a SATA drive and plugged it into my laptop. Now it says the drive needs to be formatted.

So, is it fried? Is there any way to get the data from it either via a software program or must I send it to a data recovery company? If so, which program or company would you recommend? It's a Dell Optima 3020 running Windows 7 Pro - I think - it's been so long since I even checked what it was actually running.

 

So you put the drive in a USB - SATA device and it needs to be formatted? If it is reading the physical drive chances are you can recover. Hopefully you have another drive of that size or larger. Go to https://www.osforensics.com/products/index.php and get OSF Clone and OSF Mount. Use OSFClone and clone the disk before you start experimenting on it. After a good image, get a partition tool like mini tool and try fixing the partitions & boot. You can use OSF Mount to mount the image you created and extract data.

 

As far as data recovery software, you might try Recuva from the makers of CCleaner. Wise Data Recovery is also popular.

As for a recovery service, I would just google for services in your local area, then call around. But it is important to understand data recovery can be extremely time consuming, often requiring the very sophisticated equipment. And often these drives require disassembly in a "clean-room" environment, and extensive "forensic" analysis to recover any data. In other words, it can cost many $100s or even $1000 so you need to decide right away how valuable that data is to you.

But sadly, even "IF" any data is recoverable, it is common for only some of the data to be recoverable. Not all. So when calling around, I would ask if they have a "No data, no charge" policy. Otherwise, you could be stuck with a big bill for nothing.

Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. "All" drives will fail - eventually. Your drive's failure may have been hurried along this time, or it may have just been a coincidence it happened now. A lightning strike or a drunk driver knocking down a power poll tomorrow could have done the same thing. Or a house fire or even a bad guy breaking into our homes and stealing our computers. We need to plan for the inevitable and always keep multiple backups of any data we don't want to lose - with at least one copy kept "off-site".

 

Thank you both for the suggestions. Unplugged it back into the desktop and now when I boot, I get this...I've clicked on boot with both options checked and I get a quick flash of Windows XP start screen before it goes back to the XOSL screen. I've clicked setup but it asks for a password.

 

Windows XP?

If me, I would go with foogoo's suggestion and install that drive into an enclosure or install that drive in another computer as a secondary drive (not boot drive) and try to recover and backup any files you can - if at all possible. If that really is an XP era computer, I would not put any effort in getting it going again. Even if successful, the other components are very old too and likely will fail sooner rather than later.