Backup your personal data:
It is something I would repeat every time thi kind of things happened. First rule is that you keep your important documents, pictures or certificates on some other data storage. It could be another computer, disk, DVD, CD, memory card, usb stick and many more. Capacity of disks is increasing so there is more and more files, pictures and important personal files. We realise that we can not live without them when all this data is lost.
Software:
There are many tools that can help you recover lost data or even read trough your almost unreadable disk and get some file back. Simple internet search on disk recovery will list you plenty of different SW.
But in general, user do their backup after some serious data lost and here we are. How to get our computer back as soon as possible? New system demand new installation of all SW that we had. Usually it take some time to do that. And there are so many settings that we or someone else did them for us.
Real situation:
Disk from laptop was damage because laptop all and hit the ground. I would say it is common way of damaging HDD. New disk was installed with fresh copy of operating system. Old disk was still readable but damaged and it was not possible to do a disk copy operation.
Solution:
First I did backup of new system, copy as much files from old disk to another disk just in case! It is good to do it because when disk is damaged we do not know how long are we going to be able to read files from it! So first step is recover as much files as you can! In this case some files were lost and there was no way to recover them. But in general all important data were copied on another disk.
In next step my plan was to make this laptop work as it was never broken. Since there was only disk replaced and new disk already have operating system installed and it was bootable, I used bootable CD so I could copy all files from old disk to a laptop on it's new disk. After doing so and restarting a laptop it worked again.
There were only few updates because new HDD, but in general all important data, aplications and installed certificates were restored. There was some data los, and some documents couldn't be recoverd.
Conclusion:
There is always some chance to recover lost data. In my work experience I had just few disk that were relay unreadable and was unable to recover lost data.
Remember: Be careful with free recovering tools tools. If you are not sure what they do ask some expert. Sometimes even if computer at boot shows that there is no system or disk it doesn't mean that disk is gone or that your files are lost. There could be probably just some small error that can be fixed with simple disk check utility. do not hurry and format everything and reinstall you operating system. Formatting disk is useless unless you do know why to format disk. Reinstalling operating system is good option but remember to reinstall not just make a fresh copy.
What would be the best solution:
If user would perform regular backup of all files and system state backup this restore would take just an hour or less. So do not forget to make regular backup of your files.
