How to Retrieve Pictures from a Damaged Hard Drive?

Updated on March 02, 2022

“I have stored all my old photo collections on my system hard drive. These photos include many years of memory and funny moments from my life events. But, today I ended up in a disastrous situation. My system got stuck all of a sudden and now I’m not able to access my valuable pictures and other data from the system hard drive. I guess that the hard drive might be damaged due to some logical errors and hence data is not accessible from it. Any suggestions on recovering pictures from damaged hard drives would be of great help for the needy. Thanks in advance.”

Have you ever faced situations similar to the above one and lost your precious photos from a hard drive? Then go through this article to find out the best solution for your problem. The hard drive is damaged due to many reasons. Often users save numerous data files on hard drives and when it’s corrupted/damaged, they suffer from of loss of valuable files. So, to avoid such data loss disasters, one should be aware of the below-given factors while using a hard drive:

  • When there are any software/hardware conflicts in the working of the hard drive it might cause damage to the hard drive
  • Presence of bad sectors is another cause behind the hard drive damage, because the pictures saved in such bad sectors turn unreadable and it may gradually lead to severe damage to the drive
  • Read / write head is a vital part used to access data on hard drives and if this head is crashed due to any mechanical faults or other irregularities, then hard drive gets damaged
  • Boot sector corruption in internal hard drives is another main cause for hard drives getting damaged, that makes all the drive data inaccessible

Whatever may be the reason behind hard drive damage, the result will be loss of valuable data like photos, office files and others. In such cases, you can run ‘Chkdsk’ utility provided by Microsoft on Windows operating systems. With this utility, you may successfully resolve the issues related to a damaged hard drive and access your photo files. But, this doesn’t work always. Hence, it is suggested to make use of reliable photo recovery tool before it is too late.

Best image recovery tool to extract photos from damaged hard drive:

Since many restoration utilities induce damage to picture files during the recovery process, it is necessary for users to decide which software can effectively restore pictures. Professional experts do recommend using Yodot Photo Recovery tool which is one of the most used and popular applications for various Windows OS users. Its user-friendly interface and read-only strategies have made a safe and quick way of retrieving photos from a bad hard drive within a few simple clicks.

Steps to execute damaged hard drive photo restoration on Windows:

  • Connect your damaged hard drive to a healthy Windows system as an external drive
  • Download Yodot Photo Recovery on this Windows system
  • Install and run the utility to start with the photo recovery process
  • On the main screen, select the “Lost Photo Recovery” option and click next
  • Now, all drives associated with the system will be displayed
  • Select the drive representing externally connected damaged hard disk drive
  • The software starts scanning this drive and displays recovery status via the progress bar
  • Next, a list of all recovered pictures and other files will be displayed
  • Make your selection for required files from the Data view / File type view of a list
  • Later, view the photos using the preview option
  • Next, select a destination location on the host system to save the recovered photos and click Save

Important Note:

  • Make use of a suitable and efficient antivirus program on your system to avoid dreadful malware infection
  • When a hard drive shows any symptoms of getting old or being damaged, try to solve it before data loss occurs
  • Maintain multiple backups of important files in different storage devices

Other Popular Software

Yodot Photo Recovery (Windows)

Recover and restore deleted photos lost from your digital camera memory card or the images from your Windows PC. The software can recover all popular image types including popular audio and video files.

Yodot Mac File Recovery

The only undelete application for Mac that can recover deleted files from HFS+, HFSX partitions on Mac. The software also has the ability to recover lost files using RAW signature method.