Hard drive about to kick the bucket?

My mom bought a new computer about 9 months ago, and for the most part its been running fine, its got Firefox so spyware has mostly not been an issue, but this morning her computer had some major issues. Every time it boots up, after reaching the XP loading screen, it reboots. This happens with safe mode, and also trying to load the last known working configuration.

I subsequently tried to run chkdsk on the drive from the recovery console, but it reported that it could not check the disk. After that I got tired of trying to figure out what was wrong with my options so limited, so I pulled the drive, an adventure in itself as a result of strange interior design for her case, and popped it into my machine. However, when I tried to examine the drive with the disk management utility, it reported that her hard drive was only 35 gigs and unformatted. The drive should be reporting 120 gigs, and formatted with NTFS. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure that the computer had about 35 gigs free before this problem started, so that number at least makes sense (I was using her comptuer as a file server of sorts over our home lan which is why so much of the drive was full)

At this point, a victory will be figuring out how to pull her e-mail and documents off the drive. After that, I'll run some tests to see if the drive is in need of replacement, or if a format will fix the other issues.

Pertinent specs:

Faulty Drive: Samsung SV2044D 120 gig HD

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Well, I figured out why the capacity was being misreported. Little did I know that Samsung drives have the most unintuitive jumper settings imaginable. What I thought was setting it to slave, turned out to be setting it to both slave and limiting the capacity to only 32 gb. Still working on recovering the data though.

 

Blah, I just ran some more diagnostics (Ontrack's Data Advisor) and the drive had an alert for the SMART tests. Just to confirm it, is that a bullet in the engine block?

Just a slight revision, the drive model was wrong, its a SP1203N, not whatever I said it was earlier.

 

http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2773

GetDataBack is a great utility for recovering data in which the file system has become corrupt