200gb SATA drive crash!!!

Hi all,

I've been going mad over this!
The only thing that I REALLY want to keep are the family photos taken on mother’s day. The only time I have had all of my family together for about 6 years.

I have a 200gb SATA (extra) internal hard drive. It's only about 9 months old.
The other day my pc started up reaaallllllyyyy slowly (about 15mins).

Confused face!

After a bit of tinkering I figured out that the notice at start-up telling me that my SATA drive had loaded properly was gone.
I unplugged the drive & reset, everything was back to normal (minus the SATA).

Now when I plug the drive in it goes back to being slow & the hard drive makes a nasty grinding noise.

If there is anyone here who can help I’d appreciate it a lot.

What I’ve already tried...

- Removed the sata raid drivers
- re-installed them
- upgraded bios
- cleared CMOS (by removing battery)
- Tried to boot drive on another machine (exact same model motherboard)
- replaced power supply
- re-installed XP (complete format)

Even if I were to be able to retrieve just the photos I’d be happy.
I'm not sure if it's worth buying an external Sata-usb case to try.

Please help

Thanks for your time


Simon

 

This doesen't sound good, You said that it Now when I plug the drive in it goes back to being slow so this is not a new issue, have you heard any clicking noises over a period when it was running as when drives are going you tend to get a warning with a clicking sound for a while before the clunk, I have a suggestion but that would make your warranty invalid as most drives come with a 3 year warranty. You also said re-installed XP (complete format) was it on this drive and was it partitioned ?? if so were the photos on another partion from the XP.

 

Hi,

Thanks for the swift reply...

- The clicking only started after i changed the power supply.

- I formatted my windows drive which is seperate from my other drives. It just contains XP & Programs. Just to make sure it wasn't something within XP that had corrupted.

- in regard to "Now when I plug the drive in it goes back to being slow" i ment that unplugging the drive stopped the slow startup.

The slow startup just started suddenly when i turned the pc on one afternoon. It had been running fine hours earlier.

Thanks for your time with this, i'm open to any suggestions you have.

Simon

 

Ok the next move is to go to the Hard Drive's manufacturers web site and download a 'Diagnostic' prog and run. Details on how to do this will be on the site. Running this will/should give you the status of your drive and in some cases if only a minor fault it can correct.Post back with result.And Good luck.

 

Did you say grinding? Grinding is an indication of a head crashing.

 

Yeah, grinding is bad.... very, very bad. If the pictures were on your Windows drive and you formatted it, they are gone. Well, they can be recovered, but the chances that they are all 100% healthy when recovered is slim. If the pictures are on one of your other drives, then everything is OK. Remove the drive with the pics, slave it to another PC or put it in a USB external enclosure (they're under $20) and plug it into a USB port. You can then browse the drive and burn what needs burning. If this isn't possible, you can still recovery the pics but you'll need 2 CD drives (one must be a burner) or an external drive or USB thumb drive... create a UBCD4Win and put it in the non-burning CD drive and boot to it; or plug in an external or USB thumb drive and boot to the UBCD4Win. When it's done loading, use one of the built-in file explorers (I like xplorer2) to find your pics and copy them to the external or thumb drive. If you went the other route and you have an empty CD/DVD burner, put in a blank and use one of the UBCD4Win burning programs to burn the pics to CD or DVD. Easy, no?
UBCD4Win download link http://www.majorgeeks.com/UBCD4Win_d5710.html
UBCD4Win how-to-build-the-disc link http://www.ubcd4win.com/howto.htm (it's really easy)

Good luck! I hope this helps!

:major
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