I broke it..

[AlextheBodacious]

I broke my computer by accident, & it mainly affected the keyboard & hard drive. No magnets were involved, but I'm worried:

Can I salvage my copy of KSP?

Edited May 4, 2015 by AlextheBodacious

[Reddeyfish]

if you mean the game copy itself (the stuff you need in order to run KSP), you can always re-download from the KSP store (or steam, if you bought KSP from there).

If you mean your save files....that depends on the damage.

[Gaarst]

That's impossible to tell, there are many ways your HD can be broken and it has nothing to do with KSP in particular, but all your data stored.

If it's really broken, and you want to recover its data take it to an electronic repairer and he'll tell you what he can do.

Edited May 3, 2015 by Gaarst

[-Velocity-]

Get one of those hard drive enclosures- it basically turns a hard drive you plug into it into an external hard drive that you can plug into a USB port. You can get one at Best Buy for $1000000000000 or on Amazon for $10.

[jarmund]

Your best bet is to take out the drive and mount it on a functioning machine, such as via a USB drive dock (cheap on amavon, as mentioned above). Then you use a utility, such as ddrescue to try to read the drive bit by bit into a disk image. Once you have the disk image, mount it as a read only loopback device, and see if you salvaged enough to browse the drive. If not, you might be able to extract the important parts of your install (The saves, screenshots, and ships directories.) by scanning through the image for data resembling the contents of those folders.

So simply put: Yes, it's possible. I only know how to do it in linux, but for any OS, here's a broken down todo-list:

1. Connect the drive somehow as a secondary drive

2. Read everything you can into a drive image

3. Salvage data from drive instead of disk

....that way you won't have to cope with failing hardware as you're looking for the stuff you want to extract.