Hard Drive Woes...

Hi all,

I'm having a problem with my 80GB Hitachi Deskstar hard drive. It was my primary booting drive but unfortunately the OS now fails to boot (XP with SP2.) I tried using the recovery console from the XP CD-ROM - chkdsk and then two attempts to sort out the master boot record all got me nowhere.

I am currently booting from another drive / backup XP OS (hard drive failures - been there, done that and learnt from it!) but there is data on the 80GB drive that I need to retreive - isn't there always!?!

I'd consider myself pretty competant with computers so I'd like to attempt this myself before paying a company to do the job - but what software should I use!?!

From the peculiar noises that were coming from the drive on powering it up I think there is a physical problem with it but I would like to at least attempt recovery! A program called HHD Regenerator seemed to be the application of choice but unfortunately I don't actually have a floppy drive to boot from as the program requires!

Any suggestions to either get round this or recommendations for a similar program would be gratefully received!

Thanks in advance.

 

- Doh! I think I should also mention that the drive does not appear on My Computer when attached and using an IDE-USB converter just slows up XP until it's disconnected!

 

Well, it definitely sounds like a bad hard drive. And if it is that far gone, you may have a hard time getting anything off of it. Does your BIOS even recognize the hard drive? You might try booting into safe mode with command prompt and seeing if you can see any info on the drive.

P.S. If you have a CD-RW drive you can make a bootable CD with that program on it. You don't need a floppy drive.

 

As long as you can't get the bios to see the drive it's pretty much f*cked But if you every get the bios to see it you should be able to start win from your backup drive, then access the faulty drive from within win and retrieve what you need. If the drive is empty however, read this
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=65717

That should help you get it back.

 

Hi all - thanks for the replies!

The BIOS does "see" the drive but the funky noises made me wary of booting with it without a plan of action I'll try the freezer technique (in a sealed bag of course!) and I'm going to try Zero Assumption's Data Recovery Software from DOS... fingers crossed!

 

Hi all. Still a work in progress I'm afraid. I decided to skip the freezer suggestion and try it "as is." Thoughts on the following greatfully received...

Got Zero Assumption Recovery software installed.

Rebooted with the defective drive as a slave.

BIOS acknowledged and listed the defective slave drive.

Launching XP on primary hard drive was very slow and I left the room for a few minutes only to return to find chkdsk doing it's thing - presumably on the defective drive!

Chkdsk's message was file #xxxxx is unreadable - so I let it get on with listing the few thousand files!

On returning chkdsk was now displaying file #xxxxx cannot be repaired - insufficient disk space

Seeing that I'd been trying to boot XP for the best part of an hour and the whole "cannot be repaired" was nowhere near the high numbers (!) I'd seen with the previous chkdisk "unreadable" message I decided to go for a fulll reboot of the machine, intent on cancelling chkdsk should it attempt another go!

But it didn't! Again XP was slow to boot on my primary drive with the defective drive as a slave but when it launched I then went for Zero Assumption's Recovery software...

In simple mode ZA listed the drive as a full 80gb rather than the 50gb and 30gb partitions that are (hopefully still!) on it. ZA is presently really guzzling up my CPU power (I'm using my laptop rather than desktop at the moment) and has taken about an hour so far with no signs of anything beneficial happening! Am I being too patient? Or impatient? Anyone been there and done that with Zero Assumption's software? Their website is not too helpful but suggests that it is about 1 minute per gb so maybe after 90 minutes I should start thinking about a plan B?

- Also I previously suggested HDD Regenerator as maybe suitable for the job but I only had version 1.4 rather than 1.5 - the difference being that 1.5 now lets you burn the proggy onto cd as well as floppy. Grr!

Replies with thoughts and suggestions welcomed!!!