Victoria hard drive diagnostics

I'm scanning a hard drive from a pc that had the BSOD. I'm using Victoria 4.3 and it is showing all of the sectors as green. I've already let them know that I probabally won't be able to get any of their data backed up. I'm wondering if the drive is good or not. Anyone know the answer???

It almost seems like they inadvertantly formatted the drive, but i've never scanned a freshly formatted drive so I'm not sure if this is what it shows up like in Victoria 4.3.

Also, anyone know where I can get a readme file for this program? I've kinda been winging it at this point.

 

If the drive was freshly formatted, it would be empty and wouldn't produce a BSOD. It should say something like OS not found.

There are several viruses that will destroy the file allocation table and/or boot sector causing the drive to not boot.

 

I was just told it got the BSOD, I never actually tried to boot it. They just brought me the HDD. I'm getting the PC from them today so we'll see what happens.

 

Try this link for a guide. It's a rapidshare link and RS has a free option if necessary. Mine just downloaded without even going to the rapidshare site.

I've never used the software before and am doing a scan now to see if I can interpret the results. I guess the SMART status was OK on that drive?

 

I would suggest using the machine that it was running in and booting a Linux live CD such as Knoppix. You can then search the HD if Knoppix recognizes the file system. If Knoppix is able to see the data on the drive, you can copy it to another machine on a network.

This could also be a failed HD that has scrambled itself or someone could have told the drive to compress itself. Compression usually generates a lot of problems including a very slow machine, frequent BSOD's and boot failures.

Also, if they were running Norton Go-Back, from what I've seen, it alters the drive in a way that it can not be read by installing it in another machine as a second drive. Then you would need to try to boot it in the original machine and do the recovery from there.

 

The colors represent access time. Light grey being the best down the line to slower to bad. Green is within parameters.

The colors do not represent data, so there is no indication the drive has been formatted.

 

I read what I could about the Victoria software and from what I understand if there are more then 50 green tags on the drive, it is on the verge of failure. I suspect that if they are all green, the software is having a problem reading the entire drive which would cause me to suspect the drive either has a virus that had encrypted it or the drive has faulty media causing it to be slow at reading the drive.