Recover files from external hard drive
External hard drives are very useful piece of equipment and due to advantages like portability and operation on plug and play basis it is the first choice to backup and store important data. Data on external drive will be lost due to various causes like missing/lost partition, deleted Partition, accidentally deleted file, re-formatting the drive and formatting the partition. Retrieving data from external hard drive is easy. No matter the files on external hard drive are deleted, formatted or lost, Disk Doctors Windows Data Recovery Software can get them back if they weren’t overwritten by new files.
If you have lost data from your external hard drive follow these precautionary measures to recover them successfully:
- Stop using the external hard drive immediately. If you write new data onto the external hard drive, the new data may overwrite the old data, then you can’t recover it
- Connect external hard drive onto another computer as a slave
- Install Disk Doctors Windows Data Recovery Software to this another computer, which is healthy system and has the best of hardware components, and then proceed ahead recovering the data.
Follow this step-by-step guide to recover files from external hard drive with the help of Disk Doctors Windows Data Recovery Software.
Step 1: Install Disk Doctors Windows Data Recovery Software and run the application. This will launch the application main window (see Figure a).
Figure a: Program Main Window
Step 2: The main window contains a “Wizard window”. Select ‘Recover your Data’ option and click on ‘Next’ button to continue (See Figure b).
Figure b: Select Appropriate Option
As you click ‘Next’ button, a window will be displayed to select the disk from which you wish to recover your data (see Figure ‘c’).
Figure c: Select source disk
Step 3: Select a source drive and the processing mode to process the drive. The software provides two processing modes: Display default partitions and Search for lost partitions. By default the processing mode is set to ‘Display default partitions’. As you click ‘Next’ button, the application analyses the drive and lists all the found partitions in the partition table as shown in Figure ‘d’.
Figure d: Partition Table
Step 4: Select a partition for processing and click Finish button. The application processes the partition and displays the found files and folders in a tree structure as shown in Figure ‘e’.
Figure e: Found Files and Folders
Step 5: After scanning process completes, you can preview the file before it could be recovered. To preview the file, right click on the file whose preview is to be seen and select Preview option. This will show the preview of the selected file as shown in Figure ‘f’
Figure f: Preview
Note: Other than image files all the other files would be displayed in ASCII form
Step 6: After scanning process, the only task left in recovery process is to recover files to a safe destination location..
If you want to recover whole tree structure formed, click root folder to mark whole data and click on ‘Save All’ option on the tool bar or button from the tools menu. As soon as you click on ‘Save all’ button, a window to select destination location is displayed as shown in Figure ‘g’.
Figure g: Save data
Step 7: Select a logical drive in your local disk where you wish to save the data. Specify the file type you wish to ignore (file filter) while saving process and Click OK. Make sure you do not save data to the same location from which you are recovering it.
Note: We recommend that you download the evaluation versions first which will give you first hand experience to try and test before purchasing. Evaluation version gives you a fair idea on chances of the results that the full version might deliver. We suggest that you test, evaluate and get a complete understanding of our product capability using the evaluation / demo version.
