dead heard drive

[KellyK]

Last night I was surfing the web and entered a website which had a pop up program asking if I was old enough to be accessing the site. I clicked "yes" and shortly thereafter, AOL crashed and I got the blue Windows screen signifying an error. I rebooted and then my computer started in safe mode. It ran through ScanDisk and got stuck about 3/4 of the way. I tried again and ScanDisk kept stopping at the same point. So I checked the IDE Drive Diagnostics and I got a "Fail. Return Code 7". The guy at Dell said my hard drive is dead. My computer is only 3 years old. Is there anything I can possibly do to restore my machine? There was a language barrier with the guy at Dell and I'm not sure he understood me. Also, is it possible a malicious program caused this to happen? When I start up in Normal mode, I get a "registry file was not found" message. It then has the Add New Hardware wizard but it is blank where it is supposed to tell me what hardware. It can't find any drivers for it and I'm not even sure what it's trying to install. Help!! I am heartbroken at the thought of losing all my digital camera pictures and games....
Kelly


Kelly

 

[Wishdiak]

KellyK,

It is entirely possible that the hard drive failing was coincidentally timed with the popup you encountered.

The first thing I'd suggest is to get a hard drive utility from the hard drive manufacturer and/or look up on the manufacturer's web site the meaning of the error code.

Most likely your current hard drive is either dead or dying. Hopefully it's still under warranty, but your biggest concern seems to be with data recovery.

Once you send the drive back for warranty service your data will be gone, so what you may want to do is to get another hard drive and use the utility that comes with your new drive to copy the data off of the old drive. Then if the old hard drive is still under warranty, you can send it back. If not, dead hard drives make very nice paperweights.

Wishdiak

http://www.wishdiak.com

 

[mattjurado]

Already responded to this in the ME forum.

Matt J.

Please always take the time to backup any and all data before performing any actions suggested for ANY problem, regardless of how minor a change it might seem. Also test the backup to make sure it is intact.

 

[jbrackett]

KellyK,

I know what you mean about Dell's after hours tech support. They were pretty much useless for me, as well.

If you have another computer or hard drive available, you might try slaving the "dead" drive to the working one to see if you can extract data that way. It's a pretty quick and easy fix in situations like this.

Good luck.

[sub]"The Crystal Wind is the storm, and the storm is data, and the data is life. You have been slaves, denied the storm, denied the freedom of your data. That is now ended; the whirlwind is upon you . . . . . . Whether you like it or not."[/sub]

[sup]"Trent the Uncatchable" in The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran[/sup]

 

[KellyK]

Tried slaving the drive last night on my dad's computer and it was not even recognized by his machine. In the Slave Drive section of setup it had a weird hex value instead of saying Maxtor. So then we put the drive back into my machine and now it is not being recognized by it either. Frustrating since at least before it was showing me the directory structure when it tried to add new hardware. Now I get nothing but a black screen with a cursor blinking in the corner. I think I am doomed! :-(

Kelly

 

[N0ktar]

You are not doomed, I used the software and it works miracles. Try it.

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

 

[KellyK]

Thanks but the computer won't even recognize the drive for me to be able to run any software on it. My uncle put the drive in his computer and now his won't boot up either!

Kelly

 

[N0ktar]

why don't you slave the drive and install the software? windows may not be able to read it but this software can, it scans all the hard drive sectors and collects the data for recovery.
if you're unable to slave it use WinPE

http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm

 

[JoeFrish]

Slave the hard drive and install this prog on your dads computer

http://www.fsguard.com/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

its a free download and it works great!

it will read the actual clusters of the drive instaed of looking for a file system. Its a little tricky to figure out at first, jsut keep triyng you;ll get it hope that helps -Joe

 

[mbuell]

Kelly;

Regarding slaving the drive -- It sounds to me like you may be having problems with jumper settings or some such. Take the drive to a pro shop and let them try to get your data. If you are too broke for that, keep playing with slaving the drive. You've got to get the jumpers set right on both machines, and the tape positions, and the bios settings at least. Not always a big deal, but some drives can be very particular. So it's not going for you, let the pros have a shot.

Do not use your drive as master or solo drive for anything.

>>My uncle put the drive in his computer and now his won't boot up either!

Nothing to do with the drive. Put your uncle's orig drive back in. It should boot. If it doesn't, bios settings have been changed to try and use your drive. Change the bios settings back to what they were. If you can't do this, or don't know what I'm talking about, then take both computers to a pro.

In my experience it is very rare for a drive to fail so catastrophically that you can't get most data off it.

Mark

Mark
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