HDD Accessing Problem

[Euthanasia9600]

Hi; recently my friend dropped his dell computer off at my house. It has 2 IBM Deskstar HDDs; The OS is installed on a 8gb hdd, the other has all his backups on it which is 60gb. He told me that his computer no longer boots into the OS and that he would like it (if possible) if I could access his secondary 60gb HDD and pull info off of it. I put it into one of my computers as a secondary hdd; bios detects it properly, but when I open my computer to access it my computer takes forever to open. When it finally does, I double click his drive, and it takes about a full minute before it tells me that the drive needs formatting. Is the master boot record corrupt on this drive? Is there another way I can access it? start/run/d:\ also hangs for a while and returns "hdd needs formatting"; (Running XP Pro) I know if I format it the data for the most part will be lost. What can I do to try to access the drive? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[vacunita]

My guess: the file table got corrupted.
Download any of the multitude of data recovery Apps out there and run it on the affected drive.

From this list, I noticed that PC Inspector File Recovery 3.0 was free. I'm sure there are others, and most if not all have a free trial.

http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?tg=dl-20&qt=recovery&tag=srch

You could also try Getdataback although its a bit expensive.




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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Euthanasia9600]

I will try getdataback; thank you!

 

[Santei]

and please post back about results.
just wonder if getdataback will help u.