Hard Drive Failed!

[dcusick]

Okay. What's up all? Not too happy over here. My 1 1/2 year old HDD just failed! Would boot up into the endless reboot loop. Gateway PC, with a 120 GB Maxtor drive.

Booted into Recovery Console and tried FixMBR and FixBoot, and nothing.. Ran Chkdsk and returned that there were unrecoverable errors... Not a good sign!

I need quite a bit of the data off of there, so I would REALLY like to get it back. For fun, consulted a Recovery firm, and they quoted me $500-$800. NOT worth that! (Learned my lesson on backing up, I'll tell ya!)

So, went out and bought a new HDD. Installed windows, and I'm up and running well now! However, still need that data from the old HDD. Downloaded some demo recovery programs, and ran them against the HDD, and it was able to view most of my data. So, I know the data is still on there... Just need to grab it off!

I heard of the good 'ole Freezer method. I just need enough time to grab (at the very least, 1 GB, at best, 60 GB) from the drive. I'll actually be happy with just my documents, and my mail files, but my MP3's would be nice too.

Anyone have any suggestions on this method? If not, any other suggestions that might help me? I'm in desperate need of some help here! Thanks in advance.

 

[xit]

First thing I would try is to slave your old drive and see if it shows up, if so, go to Windows Explorer and transfer as quickly as possible your data, providing you are able to read your drive.

xit

 

[dcusick]

Already did that. When I first boot into Windows, the drive is available. If I click on it, windows reports that it isn't formatted, or available, so I can't grab my files off of there... After an hour or so, the drive disappears, and requires a reboot to show up again...

 

[stduc]

You could get SpinRite (

http://www.grc.com)

and see what it has to say about the drive. You could then get GetDataBack for NTFS from

http://www.runtime.org/

Both have rescued my data in the past - SpinRite by recovering the data from bad sectors and then sparing the data to good sectors. XP then saw the disk just fine. GetDataBack recoeverd everything from a disk I had that had a completely corrupted partition table.

While you are deciding - I would recommend you keep the disk powered off. I say this because I recently had a Hitachi "deathstar" that started to develop bad sectors. I got it backed up and an hour or so later it crashed to the point that SpinRite said give this up as a bad job - or words to that effect! (I was about to get it to see what it could do). My BIOS also reported SMART imminant disk failure!!!!

As I write I am using SpinRite to verify a new disk for my Dad's machine as the original HD is beginning to report bad sectors!

Seems to be a trend at the moment.

 

[dbData]

You should go through the proper procedure to recover the data including Imaging the drive first! Only you can do the value versus risk assessment so it'll be your call.

More information can be found at

http://www.data-recovery-hub.com.

Rick

 

[mainegeek]

dcusick,
I use GetDataBack frequently and with success.