Hard Drive crash-almost

A friend's hard drive (Western Digital 120g IDE) has crashed, well, almost crashed. BIOS 'sees' the drive maybe 1 boot in 10; WindowsXP Pro saw the drive only once (with the drive as a slave of course) when running the New Hardware Wizard in a desperate attempt to access the drive. XP did not pick up the drive upon loading to the desktop. The New Hardware Wizard saw it but couldn't or didn't install it completely. It isn't listed in DeviceMgr or in My Computer. I booted to DLG5 (Western Dig's diagnostic software), and it sees the drive, but the serial number is garbled nonsense. Now, is there any way to recover this data without laying out a grip of dough for a data recovery program I'll rarely use? All I need is the music (it's in My Docs, I think). Another case of someone having a CDRW and not using it to save this 'important' music (like he couldn't re-download it or pull it off the original CD's again, whatever). Any help would be highly appreciated. Any free apps to recommend? I've tried PCI File Inspector to no avail: it won't see the drive.

H E L P ! ! !

hopperdave2000

 

This will seem like a LOT of work, but you can learn a LOT in the process...

Check this link for a way to use Linux to help you:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1918387,00.asp

If you boot from the Knoppix Live CD, you might be able to "see" the defective slave drive from within Linux. If you can see it, you should be able to copy the entire folder to another (Master) drive...

Whatever you do, do NOT try to MOVE the files. If something goes wrong during the copying process (power outage, PSU failure, whatever), you will have to begin again. If you MOVE the files, you risk corrupting them with NO backup, since they will be erased from the defective harddrive as they're being moved...

Best of all, you won't have to INSTALL Knoppix to make this work. The Knoppix Live CD is bootable; no harddrive required. This will also work with other Linux Live CD distributions, but since the instructions are written for Knoppix, I would advise you to use it.

Good luck; you have a LOT of work ahead of you, so keep in mind that this is a chance to expand your skills... let us know how things turn out...

 

Great idea I have a Knoppix CD laying around here gathering dust somewhere... I briefly though using Linux, but I don't know jacksh** about it. But I'll try the Knoppix route... If I can't find the CD, where do I download it from? knoppix.com or what????

Muchas Gracias Amigo!!

hopperdave2000