Hard Drve malfunction...

[jaredsr05]

My secondary hard drive (F began acting up the other day. I've had my Maxtor 80GB drive for a while and it has worked fine until now. Out of the blue it stopped working. Windows still recognizes it, but it shows no partitions or data under properties. The file system is set as RAW. When I click the drive to access it, a popup message tells me "The disk on drive F is not formatted. Would you like to format it?" I'm given a choice of yes or no. I really don't want to lose my data if I can avoid it. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. +JROB

 

[edfair]

This is no longer a question if you can save your data, it is now whether you can recover any data. And decision time about how much you are willing to spend to have a recovery company do it for you.
You may want to also post in the data recovery forum and look for FAQs there. Several programs are available that can help. "getdataback" is one that comes to mind.
Also might wnat to do a google search for data recovery software.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[firewolfrl]

I work on these issues ...alot it seems at times.
here are some important questions???
Was the partitions in Fat32 or NTFS?

was the computer slow at times when you went to the (MY Computer) and viewed the drives?

I am currently pulling recoverable data off a secondary drive with a NTFS and a FAT32 partition ...the FAT32 partition reads as raw (wants to format) and the drive is slow over all.

I am using Winternals Disk Commander ERD disk to pull the data off. the average time for a recoverable drive is approx. 6 to 16 hours for the data. That is if the drive only as a corrupt MFT and/or bootsector ( this is the issue with this drive)...
If you are using a NTFS partition that makes it alot easier ...because you can possibly recover using the secondary boot record

Winternals is very expensive... so follow the links others post for the free stuff

the other issue is....ask yourself....is the data worth $2000 for a data recovery center

in the business enviroment some of my clients insurance has kicked in for the cost.


wish you luck

 

[firewolfrl]

Just as an update:
I was able to get all the data off the Fat32 partition and the NTFS partition with no problem and under 4 hrs for a 60 gig IBM HD

I have a very happy customer

I do like how Winternals works ---SMILES---

jaredsr05 I do feel your pain ....

it pays to Backup


you might want to look at steve gibsons site for the spinrite program

http://www.grc.com/

 

[Rufusman]

when the drive detects in BIOS, does it detect a your model number (4D80H2 or similar) or does it detect as "calypso" or some other name? If it detects as this (the name) you may find that it is not a software issue at all, but a firmware issue.

http://www.pcbsearch.com.au