Sometimes things happen and you either forget the password to a computer, or your hard drive is failing. In either case your data may not be lost. This guide will walk through the steps I use in those cases.
The most important thing to remember with this guide is there is always a risk of data loss. In the case of hard drives that are failing there is no knowing how much time it has remaining. If you are concerned about total data loss I would recommend taking the drive to a professional.
This guide will also not work on drives that are encrypted. I have had luck recovering data using safe mode with command prompt to get data off an encrypted drive. That method is beyond this guide and requires a bit more skill on the command line.
What You’ll Need
The tools to do a basic data recovery are pretty simple. I use the following to great success.
- A Computer you wish to recover data from
- A USB drive you are going to move the data to
- A Multiboot USB drive to boot Linux from
USB Drive to Move Data to
Choosing a USB drive to transfer the data to should be pretty easy. The most important factor is enough space to store everything you wish to recover. For most modern computers I would recommend a USB hard drive. It’s relatively cheap to get a drive with the same or more storage as the computer you are recovering from. You can also use the drive as a backup drive in the future.
If you are only recovering limited data, or from a smaller drive then a flash drive will have enough storage. The advantage of flash drives to me is that I can have multiple on hand if I am doing recovery as a service. The low cost means that I can give the drive to the customer with less overall cost to them. This is obviously limited by the amount of data to be recovered.
USB Multiboot Drive
A lot of people use a single Linux distro as a live boot drive. I have found that using a multiboot drive makes my life easier. My multiboot of choice is YUMI(Your Universal Multiboot Installer). YUMI lets you have multiple Linux distros on a single drive. This saves a lot of time finding the drive you are looking for to do either 32 or 64 bit computers.
For the specific distros you have on the drive personal preference plays a lot into the decision. My recommendation is to pick Ubuntu as your distro for data recovery. The reason for picking Ubuntu is that it has the ability to mount NTFS drives out of the box. Some other distros will need to install drivers to read NTFS.
Getting Started
Now that you have all the tools you need it’s time to get down to recovering your data. The first step is setting up the computer and connecting both the drive to move the data to and the multiboot drive. Once everything is connected you are ready to turn on the computer.
When you turn on the computer you want to get to the boot menu so you can boot to the multiboot drive. On most computers the boot menu can be reached by pressing one of the function keys during startup. There is usually a brief message showing both the boot menu and BIOS menu keys. For the most recent computer I recovered it was F12.
Once you reach the boot menu you will select USB boot. That will boot the computer from the multiboot drive. Once YUMI loads up you will need to navigate to the distro you wish to use.
The YUMI Boot Menu
YUMI boots into an initial selection menu with various options. For data recovery we want to just go to the Linux Distributions section. The distros page will list all of the Linux distros you have installed to the multiboot disk.
The distro you chose to boot to is both personal preference and the computer you are recovering from. For most modern computers you will be using a 64 bit image. For older computers like one I did recently you will need a 32 bit image.
Booting Into Linux
Now that we have chosen the distro we are booting into we will be taken to the boot menu for it. The most important part to note at this stage is to select to try the distro, not to install. Trying will let us use the distro without overwriting the drive you are trying to recover data from.
Recovering Your Data
Now that we have booted into Linux it’s time to recover your data. With Ubuntu you get a UI that is fairly easy to navigate. On the left you will see a toolbar similar to the toolbar along the bottom in Windows. On that toolbar you will see all of the drives that have been detected. This list should have the multiboot drive, the USB storage drive, and the hard drive you are recovering from.
Now that you can see all of the drives it’s just a matter of opening your hard drive and copying all the data to the USB drive. Depending on the computer and amount of data to be transferred this can take some time. My most recent recovery on an older laptop took a few hours for about 30GB of data to be recovered. I would recommend checking the progress to make sure there are not any error messages that need attention.
Conclusion
At this point you should have recovered your data. I hope this guide has been helpful and clear. Data recovery in a lot of cases can be pretty easy to do yourself. That said if you are concerned I would recommend reaching out to a professional. Some data is just too important to risk.
I would also recommend that anyone that uses this guide chooses to start taking backups of important data going forward. I have had more than a few close calls with data loss. I have since found that storage is cheap and peace of mind is priceless.