Hard Drive Recovery for Dummies

A laptop hard drive

There is nothing, and we do mean nothing, more frustrating for computer users than discovering the hard drive in your laptop or desktop has gone belly-up. We know that for a fact, because it's happened to us once or twice. Fortunately, there are people out there who can help you, though you should be prepared to pay, and handsomely, for the service. Unfortunately, the kind of people who can help you do not include the likes of Nichole Liandi, whose eHow.com article "How to Fix a Crashed Hard Drive"¹ migrated over to Techwalla somewhere along the line. It's still stupid, though...

Oh, Nicky (or is it "Nichy"?) certainly comprehends the misery:

"...you may... have large amounts of music, photos and other personal items stored on the drive. The possibility of losing this information can give pause to the stoutest of hearts."

Ummm, yeah. We agree with that, especially since it will probably cost north of $200 just to recover that data. What Nichole doesn't understand, however, is that her method of "fixing" a hard drive ain't gonna work. Oh, sure, her last instruction

"...send the HDD to [a professional]..."

will indeed work. It's just that everything she says up to that point is bull. You know, stuff like telling you to make certain that the computer is getting power or that the monitor is on – obviously, she's never seen the so-called blue screen of death... And then there's this:

"Power down your computer. Remove the outer panel and locate the hard drive. It will be in a thin sealed case with several power and other cables connected to it. Disconnect the cables -- they'll unsnap easily in most cases. Locate the screws holding the hard disk drive, or HDD, in the case and unscrew them. Remove the HDD and sit [sic] it to the side." The grammatical fallacy of "sit it to the side" notwithstanding, Liandi's unfamiliarity with computer hardware is obvious. Among the problems with that rubbish are

• The bit about removing the outer panel is useless for laptops -- some laptop hard drives are inaccessible to the average person, while others simply unplug from the side or bottom of the case.
• There are not "several cables"; there is only one cable -- a ribbon -- connecting a hard drive to the CPU.
• There are often several sealed cases in a desktop; which one is the hard drive (hint: it probably says "hard drive" somewhere on it...)???

Of course, Liandi has bigger problems than just her bad instructions. For instance, she lists a recordable CD and a Hard-drive recovery program, but then turns around and tells us that

"There are several commercially available programs that promise that they can recover data from a crashed HDD, but their use is limited to some very specific situations, and attempting to use them with a truly crashed HDD can conceivably make the problem worse..."

..which pretty much renders the entire article moot, right? Of course, what we imagine is that in the eHow-to-Techwalla migration some Leaf Group drone rewrote part of her post without thinking it through. Either way, though, this is pretty useless, because it doesn't tell you how to fix a crashed hard drive, it tells you (poorly) how to send a crashed hard drive out for recovery; and never mentions that the hard drive is almost certainly toast and must be replaced. That's all we need to name Nichole and whoever rewrote this crap our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, and it can't even be found using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Bummer.

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