How to Recover Data from HDD, Flash Drive and Corrup Word Documents

Accident could be happened at any time. Power failure, virus attack, hardware failure could be a caused of an accident. One time you lost a file, find a corrupt file or else, try to recover them first by yourself before send them over a professional data recovery services. In this post, I try to offer some recovery solutions with free aid from freeware data recovery.

Recover data from hard drive, flash drive and memory card

Actually there are a lot of application you can rely on data recovery from a hard drive. This time we will ask for help to Recuva and Undelete Plus. Both are freeware (limited time for Undelete Plus) and easy to use with similar functions.

Recuva

1. Download Recuva here (2.98 mb) then install.
   
2. After installation finish, run Recuva. In the wizard choose file category you wanna recover. You can choose to recover pictures, musics, documents, videos or other.
3. Next, choose the location where the files were saved. If you can't remember, choose I'm not sure. If you choose I'm not sure, the recovery process will take longer time.
4. Next, click start to start recovery process. If Recuva can't find the file you're looking for, it will offer to do a deep scan. Deep scan takes longer time than plain process.
5. In case after deep scan Recuva still cannot find your file, go to Recuva main window, choose the directory and type file extension of filename on search bar then click scan.
6. After searching process finish and find file to recover, check the filename and click Recover, and choose directory where to save the recovered file. Make sure to not save recovered file in same location of recovery area.

Undelete Plus

1. Download Undelete Plus here (3.02 mb) and install.
   
2. Run Undelete Plusand choose drive to scan
3. After scanning process finish, usually it will display thousands of recoverable files. To make easier, we can filter by types of file.
4. If you want to more specific, click Filter on top right window and fill parameters of the file.
5. After finished, give a checkmark beside filename you want to recover, choose directory to save and click start undelete

Both application are able to recover data from usb flash drive or memory card.

File Word document recovery

Ever you got an error message when opening a .doc Word document? The error message usually say "The document name or path is not valid. Try these suggestions. Check the file permissions for the document or drive. Use the File Open dialog box to locate the document" or "Word cannot open the document".

If the data really important, you can try to recover the contents with Repair My Word. Repair My Word is able to recover all Word file from version 6.0 until 2003.

1. Download Repair My Word here (1.5 mb) and run.
2. Click Repair/Open and choose .doc file you wanna be recovered.
3. After recovery result appear, click Save in .rtf format.

FYI, Repair My Word is only able to save recovered .doc into .rtf. That means if in your .doc file there is image, table, macro etc they wouldn't be saved.