How to Recover Data from Dell Laptop Hard Drive (Won’t Boot)

Dell laptop provides you with the most advanced devices and components, which makes your work and leisure enjoyable. However, like all other laptops, HP laptops are also prone to corruption.

• System crashes or virus attacks force you to format the hard drive.
• What’s worse, the laptop may be completely down and won’t turn on at all.

In such situations, recovering data from the hard drive becomes essential. You definitely do not want to say goodbye to all the files. Well, don't panic, your missing files are still on your hard drive, although you can't see them - they are marked as deleted files, waiting to be overwritten by new data. You can let a data recovery tool help you scan the hard drive and find all deleted or hidden files.

Next, I’ll show you the detailed steps to recover data from Dell laptop hard drive.

• Go to Part 1 if your laptop still works and hard drive can be detected.
• Go to Part 2 if the hard drive cannot be recognized or laptop won’t boot up.

Part 1. How to recover data from Dell laptop hard drive

As mentioned before, you need a data recovery tool to scan your hard drive so as to find the lost files. MyRecover is recommended here. It’s one professional data recovery software for laptop & PC developed by AOMEI, the benchmark of the data recovery industry.

Main Features of My Recover

● Supports Data Recovery in Various Situations. System crashes, accidental deletion, virus attacks, disk formatting, etc.
● Supports Any Kind of Disk-based Storage Media. SSD, HDD, USB flash drive, external hard drive, SD card, etc.
● Recover Any Types of Files in Original Format. Documents, texts, pictures, videos, audios, emails, compressed files, etc.
● Highly-Compatible. Supports NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, ReFS in Windows 11/10/8/7. (Compatible with 64-bit and 32-bit OS.)
● High-Speed. With an advanced scan engine and robust data recovery algorithm, MyRecover can find and recover deleted or lost data at a very high speed.

It’s only a matter of a few clicks to recover deleted and missing files from your Dell laptop. Below is the download button.

Steps to recover data from Dell laptop hard drive

Step 1. Launch MyRecover > Hover the mouse over the drive saved deleted files before, and click Scan.

Step 2. Wait for the scanning. It will try to find Deleted files and Other missing files on your hard drive.

Step 3. Check the scanning result > Select the files you want to restore > Click the Recover button and select a destination to save them.

★Tips:

AOMEI makes it possible to recover data during the scanning process.

You can recover data up to 500MB in total. If necessary, you can upgrade to Pro version to enjoy unlimited data recovery.

Part 2. How to recover data from dead Dell laptop

If your Dell laptop won’t turn on, there are two ways you can try to get the data out of the hard drive.

• Remove the hard drive from the dead laptop and try to get data from the hard drive on another computer.
• Boot the dead Dell laptop via a bootable disk and then perform data recovery.

Recover data from a dead Dell laptop hard drive - connect to another computer

Process:

• Take out the hard drive
• Connect or insert the hard drive to another computer
• Transfer data out of the hard drive

Step 1. Remove the hard drive

Unlock your dead laptop case with the screwdriver and take the hard drive out.

Step 2. Connect the hard drive to another computer

• You can connect the drive as an external drive to computer via a USB 3.0 connection cable.
• In addition, you can install the hard drive as a new drive via a SATA cable and a power cable if the computer support installing a second hard drive. In this case, you should press F2/Del to enter BIOS > Choose Advanced > IDE Configuration > Configure SATA > Hit Enter > Choose AHCI under the SATA Option menu and save the change.

Step 3. Transfer data out of the hard drive

Transfer the files on the Dell laptop hard drive to another place. To ensure that no data is lost, you can scan the hard drive via MyRecover.

Recover data from a dead Dell laptop hard drive - use bootable disk

Process:

• Create a bootable disk
• Boot your Dell laptop
• Recover data from the hard drive

Step 1. Create bootable disk

A well-functioning computer is needed to create the bootable disk. Here are the steps to create a bootable disk via the USB stick.

• Download AOMEI Backupper Standard, one free Windows backup software you will need to create the bootable disk.
• Plug in the USB stick into computer.
• Start AOMEI Backupper, click Tools, select Create Bootable Media.

• Select the Windows PE option > Click Next to continue.
• Select the USB drive and click Next to start the bootable media creation process.

Please note that all existing data on the USB disk will be erased. If it’s not empty, you can first transfer the data to another drive as backup.

Step 2. Boot your Dell laptop

• Insert the bootable USB stick into the dead laptop, turn the laptop on and press the Del key or the F2 key at the same time to enter the BIOS/UEFI.
• In BIOS/UEFI, locate the Boot menu and look for the "Boot Sequence" or something similar > Alter the boot priority to set the laptop boot from "Removable Devices" (bootable USB disk) > Press F10 key to confirm > Then your laptop will boot from the inserted bootable media.

Step 3. Recover data from dead Dell laptop hard drive

Check the computer for any data loss. You can install MyRecover and let it help you scan your laptop and find lost or hidden files.

Final words

That’s all about how to recover data from Dell laptop hard drive. Regardless of the reason for data loss, you can let MyRecover help you scan the hard drive and recover data before the overwritten happens.

Even with a data recovery tool, there is no 100% guarantee that you will get your data back every time. For data security, it’s recommended to backup important data regularly. To save time and energy, you can set Schedule Backup through AOMEI Backupper to backup data daily, weekly, monthly.