“How do I transfer data from a dead hard drive to a new hard drive?”

(Answer requested by Mridul Mohta)

It depends on what killed the drive: An electrical problem? A mechanical problem?

Pick up the (unpowered/fully off) drive and gently shake it. Is there loose stuff inside the housing? If you hear pieces rattling around, you may have broken one or more of the disc platters (disc platters are often made of glass, coated with a metallic layer). And if the platters are broken, then for all practical purposes, the drive is toast.

If the drive seems solid, but simply doesn’t work properly when you plug it in, there are several steps you can take to try to recover it. The process varies depending on whether the drive spins up at all; or spins up, but doesn’t get recognized and assigned a drive letter by the OS; or spins up and seems to work, except that no files seem visible in File Manager or your OS’s equivalent.

Help for each of those cases is covered in an earlier post, “How do I recover data from an undetectable external hard drive?“

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