File recovery on "dead" hard drive PLEASE HELP

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by maddi, May 31, 2004.

  1. maddi

    maddi Private E-2

    Yoo fellow geeks,
    My HD a western digital 20 gb 7200 has "died" and I'm really hoping to recover some data off it (which I was in the process of burning to CD when it went).

    The start up would recognise it as the master but desktop would then go black and process no further.

    I installed a new HD and the OS (XP pro) and have tried lots of different options to recover the data:

    new hd: master
    old hd: slave
    on same strap and on separate straps, changing master and slave

    changing boot sequence to all different options on different configurations

    Sometimes startup will recognise the dead drive sometimes not, regardless once xp has booted it dosen't recognise it (can't find it). On the times the startup has recognised the drive it only registers it as 8GB (not sure if this is constant as have not always seen startup). I did have this drive partitioned into 4 of unequal size and this may of been the size of one of them.

    Are there any other ideas as to the data recovery?
    possibly through dos and if so how?
    if all else fails is there such things as commercial techs that overhaul/fix drives?

    I'm pretty sick about it really, I had a lot of personally important info on it, mainly photos and stuff

    OS WinXP pro
    CPU Althon 1600
    Ram 512mb 2100

    Thanks people

    maddi

    :)
     
  2. alanc

    alanc MajorGeek


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