Best Solutions To Laptop Data Recovery – 100% Quick & Safe

Up to now, digital device has become an indispensible part of our life. Computer, mobile phone and digital camera enrich our lives, and brought us a lot of convenience. In recent years, laptop becomes more and more popular among people mainly because it's relatively light and easy to carry around.

Yet, what if problems occurred on laptop? What if the important files lost suddenly and you don't have a backup for them? Of course, the natural response would be seeking methods for laptop data recovery. But how? As an ordinary user without any data recovery experience, can you perform hard drive file recovery alone?

Speaking of laptop hard drive data recovery, you may have the following doubts:

a). Do I need to know how to repair computer before I can actually restore our lost data?
b). If I knew nothing about programming and data recovery, can I recover laptop hard drive data?
c). Will the recovery methods provided by people on the internet damage my existing data?


Well, certainly you don't have to worry about those things. As long as your hard drive can still be detected by computer, we know how to help you recover files from hard drive. Even if your OS is crashed or can't boot as usual, we still know how to recover files from a dead laptop easily.

Actually, you only need a recovery program named MiniTool Power Data Recovery to solve all those problems quickly and safely. It provides several editions to help finish data recovery from hard disk in different cases. Considering that you may have a lot of data waiting to be saved from damaged laptop hard drive, we suggest you to buy a personal license here with a special discount (since the free edition will only allow you to save 1GB data).



That is to say, whether your hard drive is broken or not, whether the OS can boot successfully or not, you're able to find needed data on your own. Besides, only a few clicks of mouse can help to finish the recovery job.

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Solutions to Laptop Data Recovery in Different Cases

Hard drive is said to be one of the most fragile hardware in laptop, so it often become the "culprit" of common failures occurred after laptop has been used for many years. To tell the truth, improper using habits can easily make this fragile hardware "injured".

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A lot of laptop users choose to send their laptop to computer maintenance center when meeting hard drive problems. But in fact, you may try hard disk data recovery on your own; if you succeeded, a large sum of money which was going to pay for data recovery service will be saved.

Now, let's dive into the detailed steps to recover data from damaged hard drive on laptop with the help of MiniTool Power Data Recovery – one of the best data recovery tools.

Step 1: Choose the Most Suitable Module


After downloading and installing MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition V7.0, you are suggested to run it immediately.

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Then, choose a functional module which is the most suitable for your case (of course, you should register first if you have got a license key to break 1GB data recovery limit).

Which one to choose? You will have a clear understanding after reading following introduction:

  • "Undelete Recovery" is designed especially to help users recover permanently deleted files at a rapid pace.
  • "Lost Partition Recovery", as you can judge from the name, is used to deal with data loss cases when the whole partition/partitions is/are lost.
  • "Damaged Partition Recovery" helps to repair hard drive when laptop hard drive is reformatted, attacked by virus or suffering from other kinds of damage.
  • "Digital Media Recovery" is mainly created to recover multimedia files, such as photos, videos and audios from flash drives and memory sticks.
  • "CD/DVD Recovery" is a special function to cope with data recovery from CD/DVD on laptop.

Note: all functions give support to data recovery from external hard drive or other removable devices as long as they can be recognized on laptop.


Please click on the correct module to move on to the next step.

Step 2: Scan the Target Drive to Detect Lost Files


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In above interface, you'll see an obvious prompt in the top half of the page – "Select the drive you like to recover". This reminds you clearly of what you should do – select the drive which contains lost files you want to recover; afterwards, click on "Scan" button under "Undelete Recovery" or "Full Scan" button under other modules to search for missing files.

Or you can choose to "Load manually saved scan result" to import the scan result you saved last time directly.

Note: you may need to refresh the partition list by clicking on "Refresh" button at the bottom left if you connected an external device to laptop and planned to finish data recovery from it.


Step 3: Check Files from Scan Result to Recover


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When the scan is over, you'll see an interface full of found files. At this time, you should do two things:

1.) browse the found files and pick out the ones you need;
2.) click on "Save" button at bottom right to set a storage path for the files waiting to be recovered.


Then, when the recovery is over, you can go to that storage path to check whether needed files are recovered completely.

Note: when it's too difficult to find the desired files in a myriad of results, you may as well turn to "Find" function, which can search files by filename, or "Filter" function, which allows you to find files by extension, size and modification/creation date.


After you confirmed that all files you need are recovered completely, you can quit the software and finally put an end to laptop hard drive data recovery.

How to Recover Data from Laptop Hard Drive That Won't Boot


But, what if the laptop on which you're going to perform hard drive file recovery is crashed/dead? Can you recover data when you can't access the OS? Our answer is a big yes. Power Data Recovery can also help you with data recovery in this case. Here, you have 2 choices to recover data from crashed OS.

One choice is to take out the hard drive from crashed laptop and then connect it to another computer which works well, through a SATA to USB adapter; and then follow the above steps to rescue data. The other choice is to recover data directly from broken laptop with the help of bootable Power Data Recovery.

How to recover files from a dead laptop:
Firstly, download pdrbootdisk file and burn it to a USB drive (or CD/DVD disc).

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Secondly, connect this bootable device (USB drive or CD/DVD) to target laptop; and then, start the laptop and press corresponding button, such as F2, F10 and F12, to enter BIOS Setup Utility (please check your computer model to know the specific key to press); at last, adjust the Power Data Recovery boot disk to the first.

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Thirdly, save changes and quit BIOS Setup Utility to start computer through this boot disk; afterwards, you'll see the welcome page, in which you could click on "MiniTool Power Data Recovery V7.0" to enter directly or wait for the automatic boot; at last, you'll see the main interface provided with four functional modules (except the "CD/DVD Recovery") for you to choose from. Now, select a module to scan your hard drive on crashed laptop and pick out data to recover easily.

Note: please connect another removable device properly to crashed laptop in order to save recovered files safely.


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Causes for Laptop Hard Drive Failures

Both hard drive and other kinds of storage devices like USB flash drive are easy to be damaged due to lots of reasons. They can be roughly divided into two categories: physical damage and soft failure. Prompts shown on the screen and other obvious phenomena appeared when computer is powering on become the gist to determine the case for specific problem.

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When a hard disk actually fails, you should firstly start an analysis to determine whether the problem is caused by physical damage or soft failure. If it is resulted from physical damage, you had better hire professionals to help you; while if it caused by soft failures, you may as well try to recover data from broken hard disk on your own with the software we recommend above.

tip Do not do the following things blindly:

a) Don't save new data to damaged laptop hard drive.
b) Don't try to open the laptop and hard drive in it unless you know exactly how to do.
c) Don't try low-level disk formatting easily since it will erase all data completely, leaving no chance for data recovery.


Commonly Seen Physical Damage


  • Hard drive circuit failure: spindle motor will stall and cause whistle, accompanied by the hard drive light constantly flashing.

    Possible error message: "1701" or "Hard Disk Error".

  • Hard drive cavity failure: when the laptop is powering on, the hard disk cavity sounds abnormally.

    Possible error message: an obvious long "da da da" head crash sound.

  • Hard drive adapter or connector failure: when system power-on self-test is performed to hard disk subsystem, it can't pass, and the hard drive light does not shine.

    Possible error message: "1701, Hard Disk Error" or "HDD Controller Error".

  • 0 cylinder failure: after a long-time hard disk self-test, boot failure occurs.

    Possible error message: "Disk Boot Failure TRACK 0 BAD".

Hard Drive Soft Failures


To be specific, hard drive soft failure refers to the loss, damage and modification of some important & special hard drive data, causing boot failure or read and write failure. Indeed, those data are not actually lost, they can be recovered in special ways.

Soft failure mainly includes: CMOS data parameter missing, hard disk master boot record damage, hard disk DOS boot sector error, etc.

By trying your best to avoid those physical damage & soft failures, you're able to get away from sudden data loss as much as possible.

Background Knowledge of Laptop Hard Drive

Designed especially for mobile devices such as laptop, laptop hard drive is provided with characteristics of small size, low power consumption and shockproof.

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Main Parameters


A. Size: generally, the size of laptop hard drive is 2.5 inches (the size of some more compact drives is even 1.8 inches), while that of desktop hard drive is generally 3.5 inches.

B. Thickness: this parameter has nothing to do with desktop. There're four standard thickness values for laptop hard drive – 7mm, 9.5mm, 12.5mm and 17.5mm.

C. Rotational speed: the fastest rotational speed of laptop hard drive currently is 1000 rpm.

D. Connection: hard drive in laptop is often connected to the motherboard through following 3 ways – connecting hard drive pins with socket on the motherboard directly, connecting hard drive with motherboard via a special line and using adapter to connect hard drive with socket on the motherboard.

E. Capacity technology: for laptop hard drive, the requirement for not only capacity, but also size is increasing. In order to solve this contradiction, magnetoresistive head (MR) technology or extended magnetoresistive head (MRX) technology is generally adopted in laptop hard drive.

Performance Bottleneck


Though laptop is smaller in size than originally desktop computer, there're still lots of people prefer to choose the seemingly clumsy desktop. Why? That is mainly because we found several bottlenecks in laptop performance resulted from its hard drive limitation.

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Even if the rotational speed of a laptop hard drive is the same with that of a desktop hard drive, the outer edge line speed of the former is not comparable to that of the later. Besides, internal space of laptop is relatively small, blocking the heat dissipation; the battery capacity is limited; and the requirement for components size, electric energy consumption and sturdiness of laptop hard drive is pretty high due to the unavoidable bump occurred when laptop is moving.

Bottom Line

When you find your laptop is dead, don't be worried and do the following things one by one:

a) Determine the cause of laptop problem; does it belong to soft failure or physical damage?
b) Make the right choice after analysis – turn to professionals or use powerful recovery tool to perform laptop data recovery personally.
c) Check the files recovered by professionals or third-party recovery tool.
d) Know the common causes for laptop hard drive damage problems and try to avoid them the next time.


Remember, the most important thing is stopping using the laptop right away after finding your laptop hard drive is crashed. Then, seize your time to recover data from dead hard drive. Hope you all can find back your lost files at once.

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