How do I recover data from a corrupted hard drive that will not boot? Do I need to connect it to the computer as a slave disk?

Your ability to recover data from the corrupt disk will depend highly upon the degree of corruption on the disk. Should this be a simple case of the Windows installation on that drive becoming corrupt and unbootable then you should be able to access the drive to recover data. However, if the actual drive itself is completely corrupt, or has developed a hardware fault, then it is unlikely that you can recover the data from the drive and would probably need to send the drive to a data recovery specialist (which can cost several thousand dollars, depending on the state of the drive). However, we will deal with the situation where the drive and data are fine, but the drive will not boot the computer, as this is the easiest (and really, only) situation which we can solve.

You are correct that you should connect the corrupt drive to your computer as a slave drive. As always, whenever you do any internal work within a computer make sure to disconnect the power and properly ground yourself. Also, only proceed if you are confident that you can fix anything which you break! Getting back on topic, the hard drive which is working in your computer at the moment should be the master drive and when you connect the corrupt drive this should be set as the slave. You will immediately be able to tell whether you have connected the drive correctly as the computer should boot as per normal – if it complains that there is no bootable device then either it is attempting to boot from the corrupt hard drive, or it is not booting from either drive (and something has gone very wrong with the way you configured the drives in the computer). Just remember, if you make any changes to drive configurations in the computer (no matter how small) make sure you write down the change in detail so that they can be reversed if things don’t go to plan.

Once you have booted the computer you should arrive into Windows. For the benefit of this procedure I assume that you are running Windows XP (the process is very similar for Windows Vista and 7). Open My Computer and check whether the drive has appeared. If so, you should be able to access the drive and start copying data from that drive across to your good hard drive. However, if the drive does not appear then we may need to assign it a drive letter, as often Windows XP will not automatically assign new drives a drive letter. Go to the “Start” menu then right-click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”. In the Computer Management window that appears, click “Disk Management”. You will now see a listing of volumes (drives) and one should appear with no drive letter assigned. Right-click on this volume and click “Change Drive Letter and Paths”. Click the “Add” button to assign the drive a letter then click OK. Return to My Computer and you should see that the drive has appeared with that drive letter assignment, allowing you to access the drive.

In the event that you cannot see the drive within the Computer Management window (and thus cannot assign the drive a letter) in the first instance you should verify that the corrupt drive has been correctly connected to your computer. Assuming all is correct, at this point the drive may be too corrupted to be recognised by your computer. In this case, I would seek the assistance of a computer technician and then a specialist data recovery firm should that be necessary.

As a side note, if you often need to transfer data between internal drives a very easy method which does not require you to open the computer and connect the drive is to purchase a USB Universal Drive Adapter Kit (www.newertech.com/products/usb2_adaptv2.php). This kit has adapters for all the major types of drives (SATA, IDE, etc) and allows for the connection of the drive via USB rather than internally in the computer. This is incredibly useful and could save you a lot of hassle in the future. I would recommend that you look at one of these kits should you need to do this again.