The other day, when turning my laptop on, I got a "Hard disk 3f0 error", and it appears that the drive is completely broken - or at least, I haven't been able to find a way of fixing this...
The drive that Windows is installed on is an SSD drive, but the laptop also has a separate HDD on which I have backed up a number of files.
I would assume that given Windows is installed on the SSD, this is the drive which is having the hard disk 3f0 error, but that the HDD drive should still be fine & working normally.
How can I access the HDD in order to retrieve the files stored on it? Is it as simple as connecting a network cable from the broken laptop to another computer, or is there something else I should be doing?
1 Answer
The other day, when turning my laptop on, I got a "Hard disk 3f0 error", and it appears that the drive is completely broken
That is likely the case - that the hard drive has failed.
Courses of action:
Move it (in a carrier) to another machine and see if you can read it on another machine. This might possibly work. Carriers for both Hard Drives and SSD drives are commonly available.
If the data is important, consider getting an assessment for recovery from a local data recovery agency. Do the recovery agency assessment before recovery software on the Internet.
If you wish to try, the following software is reasonable: Recuva (CC Cleaner); Easus recovery software; and Spinrite (Gibson Research). These tools are commonly available on the Internet.
