Tracey, if the "crashed" due to windows becoming inoperable and not a physical or electrical failure of the operation of the hard drive, you could remove the drive and either connect it to a spare SATA or PATA channel if you have one on the working machine or obtain a compatible USB caddy and put the drive in that and use that to access the drive. If the drive fails to initialise itself and is not detected by the machines BIOS then this or any other windows software will not be able to recover the lost data... new controller board might need to be fitted or even new heads... get the drive working then this might help... but then I'd suggest first imaging the drive to file on a good drive or cloning to a new good drive and searching the image file or new good drive clone and not the damaged original. Of course this cannot create or search a drive image file and must work on the source drive itself. Would be a sensible idea if the developers offered an option to create bootable media for recovery on otherwise non-bootable systems...

Tracey,

If you need help with that step, I suspect that you will probably have a hard time accomplishing the recovery. Recovery software, even though it may be easy to use, requires a bare minimum knowledge of how a PC works and the hardware that is involved in its operation. If you do not have that knowledge, you may do more harm than good to the hard drive you are looking to recover.

The short and sweet answer is: You remove the dead drive from the PC that won't boot and connect it to a working PC via direct connection to the working PCs mother board, or via a USB adapter. You then run the software on the working PC, scan the dead drive, and pray it finds what you want to recover. If it does, then you recover that data by saving it to the drive in the working PC.

Just remember, this is DATA recovery software. It's going to find things like Pictures, Documents, etc. It's not going to magically make the old hard drive bootable, or work again. It can probably recover SOME things from a drive, if that drive has some form of data corruption, but the drive itself still needs to be in working order. By working order I meaning that the platters need to spin, the heads need to be able to read the data from the platters, etc. If the hard drive is truly "dead", as in has a mechanical or electrical failure of some sort, this software won't do anything for you.

Hi [ Tracey ],

This software is not for you, you do not have a crashed hard drive.

This software works by attaching a crashed drive to a working computer, a working computer that has this software installed and running, and then the working computer reads the bad drive and saves what it finds to somewhere in a directory on the working computer.

You do NOT have a bad drive, you just can't boot, but all your data is there, you just can't see it.

So either

- boot the all-in-one computer from a bootable USB thumb drive system or equivalent, and then drag and drop your data from the internal drive to another attached external drive or USB thumb drive, or

- remove the internal drive from the all-in-one computer, and then connect it to a working computer, and drag-and-drop the files you want.

You do not need this software when you can simply drag and drop files from one drive to another, from the unbootable drive to another drive that is working and running.

Separately, reinstall Windows on the all-in-one, following the computer maker's instructions with the computer maker's resources.

Do NOT install Windows 10 unless the computer came with Windows 10, instead, install the original Windows version that the computer came with originally.

Good luck, and let us know if you need more help.
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Tracey, I recovered data from a dead Windows machine by booting from a USB-stick with a Live Linux.

In my experience, with all of the recovery tools that have been on GOTD, you shouldn't plan on being able to get a functioning copy of Windows, or perhaps most apps back. It *might* work if you just have to rebuild the partition tables when a partition has been lost, e.g. accidentally deleted, but otherwise many file names will be incorrect, as will the listed paths to many files. These file recovery tools are mainly intended for data files, like pictures & documents etc. that you didn't have backed up, or for forensics.

Rich, no it won't recreate a working partition entry for a deleted or otherwise lost partition or restore a corrupted file system to a working condition. At best it could provide a virtual file system that you can export the files and folders to a different drive letter.

"Is there anyway to just scan an existing single folder and sub-folders?"

Problem with that is the blocks making up a file or files can literally be stored anywhere on a hard disk, so a recovery tool starts at one end and scans to the other end -- you won't know what they found till it's completed.

Mo, probably due to their use of unsupportable claims like recovering files from erased SSD or "Easily Recover Lost Data under All Data Loss Situations." Even if their software is totally benign and works as it should they ruin their community reporting based trust rating by making demonstrably false claims for their softwares capabilities.

Mo,

No problem here with 4 different browsers. Sounds Like Total AV is your problem.

Sig Lane, yes you can but it probably becomes unregistered when new hardware is detected, from what i have seen, the registration is bound to hardware. But don't ask me which one exactly, i guess some PC parts.

If you put it on a stick (the programs installed folder) and register it afterwards, you should be fine, at least for the same PC.

Sig Lane, as long as you first install it on a PC normally, activate it using the license provided then copy the entire installation folder to a folder on a USB drive. I have not tested to see if it will run under a WinPE version of windows and I won't be trying it.... you'll have to do something for yourself every now and then!

eltrgz, possibly if you saved the location where you stored the backup DVD for safe keeping in a file that was recently deleted on a windows based PC :-p It won't help if the data was lost on an iOS or MacOS system or any number of non-windows imbedded devices..

"... will it help me find that backup DVD I burnt and forgot where I stored it..."

Search the drive(s) for "ISO" &/or "VOB" using Windows search or whatever tool you prefer.

DoYourData, thank you for the program.
Kind regards,