(+) How to Recover Data from a Dead PC

The following article was written by and is copyright by Dick Eastman. 

NOTE: This article does not contain any genealogy information although it can retrieve such information. For instance, a friend of mine recently suffered a PC failure. She was left with a PC that would not even boot Windows. She told me that she had lost her genealogy information as a result. I replied, "Not so. You can probably recover that data with just a little bit of work." She gave me her PC and within a couple of hours, I retrieved all of her genealogy information, along with her checkbook data, income tax records, email correspondence, and much more. I thought I would share the recovery techniques with you.

Many people believe that, when a computer dies and will not boot any more, all data is lost forever. They assume that all the files on the hard drive have disappeared and that nothing can be done about it. In some situations, that may be true. However, after repairing many computers over the past 40+ years (starting long before the invention of the PC), I can assure you that data can be recovered in a high percentage of computer failures.

The problem may be a hardware failure or a software failure. First, let's look at hardware failures.

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