To recover a hard drive or another storage device like usb sticks or any cards, you can use the general tasks 'how to recover files from hard drive' or 'how to recover partition'.

However, I'll give some additional hints to recover hard drives or other storage devices. If you only want to recover a usb stick or memory card, be lucky because this is a very short task without any huge time or storage resources. For any bigger jobs keep the following list in mind:

• If the hard drive make any sounds or the drive has bad sectors onto it, make a disk image to a 'good' hard drive.
  If you are unsure, send the hard drive to a service lab!
• Install the 'broken' hard drive as slave (second) hard drive into your PC. Alternative, you can use an external case for the 'broken' hard drive. But this recovery solution could be slow, depending on the USB version.
  Don't install any software on the broken hard drive.
• Normally, newer hard drives are big. That means you want to recover hundred of giga bytes from one or more partitions. For this you need a second hard drive on which you can copy the recovered data.
• To recover a huge hard drive you need much time recourses. Data LifeSaver needs approx. 30min/100GB for the scan of an internal hard drive. That means for a full recovery task of a 500GB internal hard drive a need of approx. 7,5 hours. The reason for this is that the copying process need two actions. Read out the files to recover and write down the recovered files to the new drive.
• Don't recycle the bad drive to fast. Put it away for weeks or months and forget it. Sometimes you miss some files and have to recover the files later.
• The quality of a file recovery could be very different and depends on the kind of data loss. Check random sample files before buying a license. You can do this by double click the files and evaluate the file content. This is very easy for jpeg-pictures and more.