Accessing Bad HD with Another HD?

Hello. I've been using this site for a long time...love it. Extremely helpful place. I just recently became a member. This is my first post. I have 2 PCs that do not work in front of me, and one very old laptop that does. The one I'm asking for help with is an HP Pavillion A340n (5 years old?). It's a family member's PC. It crashed and they couldn't fix it. They brought it to an expert who said it would cost $800 to get data off HD. They bought a new PC and went home. I'm no expert but I know a little from experience. Experience is how I learn. I hate asking for help...but...I really need help! :crybaby My husband's sick of seeing this mess lol. I know I can retrieve their family pictures (they never backed up ). I have several ideas. I don't have an XP Home CD. I do have restore CDs from original configuration and a backup on the HD as a second partition (I386) as well. The HD has errors that cannnot be fixed (chkdsk) and Windows freezes at logo at boot even in safe Mode. If I run chkdsk from I386 and specify checking/repairing etc on partition with data, it freezes at 60% every time. If I run from partition with data it ends with the one or more errors message. At one point it said "unrecoverable". I did get XP to boot a few times...extremely slow and unstable then froze when I tried to copy pic folders to USB. I tried to boot using SeaTools (diagnostics) CD I made and that froze too. Anybody have ideas? My latest... put in a 60GB Western Digital Caviar WDC WD600AB as Master, with the bad Seagate HD as slave figuring if I can boot the WD HD and see the contents of the Seagate I can copy them to the good drive.So, I put the WD in the master on the cable with jumpers set to master. I moved the Seagate to slave (same cord) with jumpers set to cable select. I can't get anything but Recovery Console no matter what I select!!! I can see both HDs in BIOS as 1st Master and slave. I see them in recovery console. Should I have made bad HD another Master or a slave to the CD drive or something instead? What am I doing wrong? :confused

Specs:
[Motherboard] Manufacturer's name - ASUS P4SD-LA - HP/Compaq name - Stingray. - Board Form Factor - uATX,
[Hard drive] 160GB Seagate Barracuda - model #ST3120025A Ultra ATA U Series 9,
[RAM] 512 (256 MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM x 2)
[Processor] 2.60GHz Intel Pentium 4HT CPU 2.60GHz w/HT Technology [OS] Windows XP Home SP3
[Other] onboard Intel Extreme Graphics 2 - 'AC 97, floppy, CDRW, DVD-ROM & a few USBs

 

Hey minahe, You could try using a linux based live cd and try to transfer the data you need to USB that way.

Ther are many to choose from, although i've heard good things about knoppix in these type of instances... http://www.knoppix.org/ .... but any *nix based live CD should do the trick.

 

That sounds good. I will check it out.

 

You could put the Bad HDD as a slave in a working machine and run some recovery software on the HDD such as BadCopy Pro to see what data you can recover, you can also set what *.* (extentions) it recovers such as *.jpg etc. this way you can get just your photos back.

But can I ask one thing if you do give the HDD power and try start it up do you hear a clicking? or any other strange sounds that don't sound healthy. If this is the case we might be guiding you through the freezer trick sometime during this post haha..

But certainly give what ~Q~ suggested a try aswell


Good luck!

 

this is kinda an easy way out if you dont want to spend all the time working with master and slave and running recovery programs.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002
I've used this to recover data on multiple hard drives. the only problem I ever faced was finding software to recover data off of a formatted hard drive. ntfs recovery worked pretty well. other than that this tool save me a lot of time. hope it helps.

 

I'm with jguy6, especially since all you have working is a laptop. Hook the hd with the pictures up to your laptop using the USB cable and put the files on a USB stick. Or, even better, take the hd and the adapter to the home of the folks with the new computer. Put the contents of My Documents, My Pictures...on the desktop of their computer in folders. Then they can burn the pictures to a CD or DVD.
You can then take the hd home and work on getting the old computer working knowing that they now have the files.

A friend of mine had a computer die. He didn't want to wait for me to drive up (it's about 2 hours away) so he went out and bought a new computer. I took the hd out of the dead computer, hooked it up, with an adapter similar to the one at newegg, and put all his files in a folder on his desktop of the new computer. I took the dead computer home and cleaned it up, put in a new power supply and added RAM. It's working well and my husband uses it.