What is a Drive
The drive in your computer, also known as a hard drive, hard disk or solid state drive is a device in your computer for storing information, programs, operating system files and personal data such as movies, pictures and documents.
Hard drives are not only for computers. Although this post will specifically be directed at the hard drives inside computers, you can also find them in mobile devices, they can be external (in the shape of USB thumb drive) or in watches, fridges, cars and just in just about any smart device you can think of and more.
What is a Primary Drive
It’s not uncommon for computers, laptops, notebooks and desktop PC’s to have more than one internal hard drive. Hard drives are much cheaper than they use to be and people collect and store a lot more data.
When you have more than one hard drive, the one with your operating system files, that is your C drive with Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX or Linux on it, is your primary hard drive.
You can install your program running files on your secondary drive, which is called your storage drive, but in a lot of cases when computers shipped with more than one drive, the primary drive is usually a Solid State Drive which is much faster than the secondary, which is usually a standard hard disk drive.
Data Recovery from Primary Drive
Data Recovery can be very complex, no matter what media or device you are trying to retrieve from.
Why a lot of people are unsuccessful recovering their data from their primary drives is because it is very difficult to recover the data from a drive you are currently using to run your computer.
If you are running your operating system from the same drive you are trying to recover data from it is difficult because as you are running the data recovery software, that program, as well as other programs and the operating system itself are also reading and writing from the drive you are trying to recover.
Further more, every time you run your computer from the primary drive you are trying to recover from, you are writing to that drive with everything you do, including just starting up your computer. This can very well wrote over the data you are trying to recover.
How to Recover Data from Your Primary Drive
The secret to removing data from your primary drive is to take it offline.
By taking it offline i do not mean stop using it. What that basically means is stop using it as your primary drive. That is, do not boot from that drive.
There are two ways to do this for the most part.
The first is, booting your computer to a USB or recovery disk of some kind, instead of your primary drive. If your computer is able to, then you might be able to recover the data using a different operating disk in the form of a USB recovery device.
The second, if you already have another computer, specifically with your recovery software installed, you can mount your primary drive you want to recover into that second computer and try and recovery that drive there.
When you try and run your data recovery software from your primary drive, if it is not installed before you had a problem, you also run the risk of writing over your data you want to recover, simply by installing your data recovery software.
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