5 Troubleshooting Hacks for Unbootable Windows 8.1 PC

The day-to-day life and business depends on the security of your data stored on your hard drive and you can’t afford to lose it. Due to physical and logical hard drive failures, data become inaccessible or lost forever.

Get into the habit of taking regular backups as it’s the only possible way of restoring files if the external hard drive or similar storage devices failed. According to stats of Backblaze, small capacity drives will work for longer period of time as compared to large capacity drives such as 4 TB

First, we will get to know the reasons of external hard drive failures and their symptoms:

Physical hard drive failures:

When an external hard disk drive malfunctions, the stored information cannot be accessed. This is known as a physical hard drive failure. A head crash is a physical hard drive failure when a read–write head of a hard disk drive comes in contact with its platter. Given below are some symptoms of physical hard drive failures:

Symptoms:

1. Non detectable external hard drive by system BIOS
2. Unexpected slowing down of computer
3. Frequent occurrence of Blue screen of Death
4. Accumulation of large amount of bad sectors
5. External hard drive platters not spinning at all.
6. Clicking or grinding sounds

Logical drive failures:

These failures occur by corruption of the file system or corrupt directory structure. Sometimes logical damages of the external hard drive can be handled by the computer user if certain precautions are taken. Given below are some reasons of logical drive failures:

1. File system corruption: This happens if important system files go missing or are somehow damaged.
2. Virus attacks: Different kind of virus or Trojan have been created to steal important data and abrupt normal functioning of your PC. Virus infection may cause serious damage to your PC and hide or permanently erase stored files.
3. Master Boot Record Failure: MBR (Master Boot Record) is an integral part of your PC that has important booting instructions and ways how files will be stored. Once the MBR is corrupted or becomes inaccessible, you may not able to access your PC and hence, stored data will become inaccessible.
4. Non- accessible external hard disk: At times it happens that when you try opening an external hard disk, such as F, the message pops and says, “F: is not accessible, access is denied.”

Other reasons:

1. Deleting files from external hard disk by accident.
2. Improper shutdown of the computer if power surge occurs.
3. File corruption caused by program or software conflicts.

It is not always possible to back up your hard drive. Therefore, to ensure the security of your data, it is required to find good quality data recovery software. Losing files is easy, but to restore them isn’t much harder with data recovery software available online. Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery Software reconstructs lost files, regardless of whether they are inaccessible due to a crashed hard drive or virus infection.

Steps to do hard disk data recovery with Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery Software:

• Connect the external hard drive in the computer.
• Run Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software.
• Click Drive Recovery option from main user interface.
• In ‘Select Volumes to Recover Data’ section, all logical volumes and external hard drives with volume details will be listed.
• Select the external hard drive from which you want to recover data.
• A flying pane occurs where the following scanning options are displayed and on clicking on one of these options, you can initiate your recovery:
• Quick Recovery
• Deleted Recovery
• Advanced Recovery
• Raw Recovery
• Choose Advanced Recovery and click NTFS to recover data from the external hard drive.
• Initiate the scanning process.
• All files and folders that are found in the scanned volume are shown in a three pane structure i.e., Classic tree, Filetype list and Filtered tree.
• Click a tab to preview a file.
• You can also rename the file before recovery. Right-click the file and select Rename to rename it.
• Click Recover.
• A Select Destination dialog box is displayed. Specify the destination and choose the options as per needed.
• Click OK to start save process.

Featured photo credit: BlackBlaze via backblaze.com

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