It has happened to about 25% of all modern cyclist. Where a hard drive, a flash drive, a go pro camera or smart phone falls of the bicycle. Now what, what are the options to recovery?

Here is an article provided by one of our contributors that might provide some valid points and great assistance for such a situation.

Five tips for restoring an unbootable hard drive

It is common for most people to try to restart their machines, only for their machine to fail in booting. Normally, this occurrence leads to shock and panic as you are lost wondering what you might have done wrong. We give you some tips on how you can make your machine work normally again. All is not lost yet, not before you have tried out all these tips!

Use a restore disk to boot– Usually, many operating systems allow you to create restore disks that can be used when your machine fails to boot. The booting problem can be as a result of the absence of this restore disk and it is therefore very advisable to install a restore disk whenever you buy a new computer or install a new operating system. In an instance that your machine won’t boot, you should try booting from a restore disk.

Make use of the install disk– If you forgot to create a recovery disk but still have the installation disk, then you should not worry. These disks usually come with data recovery tools that can be used when fixing the booting problem. The tools also allow you to restore your hard drive from the image, perform a system restore and also diagnose the memory of your machine.

Know the BartPE– Most people find it hard to build the BartPE, however, it is worth the challenge and you should invest in it. BartPE makes a full pre-installed Win32 environment on the hard drive. This allows the user to make use of the various tools that are used when repairing your machine.

Rebuild the MBR– Mostly, the boot problem is caused by a corrupt or damaged master boot record or the MBR. In such an instance, then the master boot record must be built again. The rebuilding process is different depending on your operating system. For instance, if you are using windows 7, then you should use Bootre.exe tool to rebuild the MBR. You can also use some computer forensic tools to rebuild the Master boot sector or use a hex editor to manually re-create the MBR.

Remove your drive– If you have tried all the above and still your machine won’t boot, then it is time to try your drive on a working machine. Sometimes, your drive will stop working as a result of a physical damage. If you find out that your drive can be seen but cannot be accessed, then you should consider checking on the partitioning of your drive. If the drive cannot even be seen, then your drive could be having some physical damage. However, if your drive can be seen and also accessed, then the likely problem is the MBR.