Corrupted Hard Drive

[pivich]

Yesterday, my computer froze. So I pressed restart button. After reboot computer couldn't boot windows. It would just show me the starting picture of windows on the black background with the moving blue progress bar. Nothing would happen after that. Bios works fine and it shows my hard drive and all other components. SO I went to reinstall windows. For some reason it didn't show me windows repair feature so I decided to format my disk c and install a new version. But it didn't work, after getting a couple percent it showed me an error saying that it can't install windows on that partition.
I'm stuck right now. I know there are file recovery software, but they work from the functioning windows and I can't even get in there. I'm still confused whether the problem is in the hard drive, because it shows up on the bios.
What can be a problem?

Thanks for the help!

 

[wahnula]

pivich

http://www.runtime.org

has some excellent advice & utilities for data recovery. It will require a second, new, and hopefully large enough drive to create a partition for Windows and a partition for the data to be recovered. First step: get Windows up on the mew drive, connect the old drive as slave, and image it to the second partition. They explain it way better than I can.

Tony

 

[stduc]

I would recommend you check something hasn't come at least partially dislodged inside your PC. Check all cables - especially your HDD cables are securely home. Whilst you have the case open check all cards are seated correctly as well.

The you need to check the state of your HDD. The best software I am aware of to do this is Spinrite from grc.com. You could also use chkdsk via your XP CD in recovery console (try chkdsk c: /v/r/f) But chkdsk may fail as the HDD is at present sort of half formatted (I guess). Spinrite will tell you how many errors the drive has been suffering from and how many unrecovered errors there have been as well as reporting the SMART data. It will also test the disk and recover any bad sectors.

After doing the above you can then follow wahnula's advise.

But it is possible your HDD has suffered a catastrophic failure and the only way to get your data back will be via a specialised and expensive data recovery service.

Either way you need to get another drive if you want your data back and two new drives to use getdataback from runtime (1 to install XP on and one to recover your data to). You can recover to the same HDD as XP is running on - but it is not advisable.

I have been known to be wrong.

 

[PRPhx]

pivich,
First, is the drive making any kind of funny noise, like a clicking noise? If it is, the drive is dead. If not, then, even if you lose data/program you may be able to recover the drive. Hopefully you have backed up your important stuff. If not, let this be a good learning experience (We've all had then). Go to the drive's manufacturer's web site. They should have a low level format program for your particular drive. Down load, put it on a bootable device (floppy or cd). Run it. WARNING: This is a destructive process. It WILL destroy any all files on your computer. However, it will also set the drive back to the factory default. It should also detect and lock all bad sectors.

Then go ahead and reinstall Windows. It will detect the fact you don't have any partitions and will allow you to set them up.

Good luck!

 

[firewolfrl]

if you needed the data on the drive and you were planning on doing data recovery when you formated the drive and tried to reload windows...WHY?

you quoted"I know there are file recovery software, but they work from the functioning windows "

that is a totally untrue statement. there are many recovery software that work fine or better from a bootable cd or floppy
a very good compilation of software is hiren's boot cd ( I am not posting the link you have to google it)

just the fact that you formated then reloaded, you may have made the data unrecoverable because the new windows install may have overwrote the data.

wahnula's suggestion is very good and spinrite is a great program

the best way to get data is to recover the data using the drive as a slave in a working system. or if you have to use the same system

if the data is not an issue ...as you were willing to reformat...download powermax

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Maxtor_Powermax_d1386.html

then zero out the drive
if the drive has issues it will not zero out
and yes bad drives can still show up in the bios

 

[kjv1611]

Here's another suggestion. This site/company has several recovery programs - some which can bee booted from (without running Windows for instance), and they can actually recover the partition where it is. I just recovered a whole heap of data with it, and I can highly recommend it. I'm at least considering buying their whole package deal to keep around, b/c it's really good - based on my personal experience.

Also, they have at least one floppy bootable version, and one CD bootable.

http://www.active-undelete.com/products.htm#partition

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me