Is the Hard Drive Burned up or should I look for something else?

[AV1611]

I have a weird problem that happened to my computer. This computer has a surge protector on it. It has two hard drives. I came in the office to a blue screen of death. It had some kind of message about running check disk on the hard drive etc.

One of the hard drives a 40gig had the OS, Windows 2000 Pro. The other had two partitions. One had Dicom images being saved to it and the other is used for storage.

Now I ran Check-It Pro on the HD with the OS. The Linear Test on the Hard Drive FAILED. The Controller passed. I cancelled the test before it finished testing the Random, Butterfly, and Seek test that it does. I was in a hurry and after the Linear test failed I assumed I needed to hurry up and get another Hard drive in it.

I put in a new hard drive and installed 2000 Pro. The 2000 install told me that the 80gig was either unformatted or Damaged. When I booted up into Windows on the New Drive the 80gig was slaved and it wouldn't even show up.

I then slaved the 40gig that had the OS and it would show up but when I tried to access it, then it would lock the computer up.

I tried to install another Windows on the 40gig so that I could retrieve data on it but it said it was damaged and needed to be reformatted.

I said all that to find out any suggestions of what might have happened to my drives. They were very hot. The room was hot and there was no fans in the PC except the fan in the power supply. Also how did it get both of my hard drives at the same time and everything else in the PC is working fine? Also what is the Linear Test and what does it mean by failing?

And LAST but not LEAST, Can I retrieve any information off of hard drives that the computer says is either unformatted or damaged?

Michael

 

[Kofy]

sometimes you can just by hooking the drive up as a slave and doing a direct copy off.. but if not you might wish to try GetDataBack from Runtime.org they have both Fat and NTFS versions. I've used the NTFS version and was able to retreive 30 gigs.. and I know of many other cases where retrieval was as much as 80 gigs or more.

 

[BadBigBen]

Hi there, have you tried another IDE cable? might be that after the surge that the cable became damaged...

for data retrieval I use PC Inspector Filerecovery... or hook it up to another non DOS based Computersystem (it's DOS disregards grown defects and allows me to access the HD where the PC says its defective...)

it might also help turning the DMA access to the drive off and run it in PIO mode...

Ben

 

[ImpetusEra]

Check your permissions for the slave drive. When I formatted and reinstalled I could not access the drive until I reset the permissions. As said try another cable. Unless you did something like fdisk the drive should show up and be accessible (assuming the permissions are set). I don't see it too likely that both drives would go at once.

 

[sparkintine]

Actually I had this simular problem on my computer...I had two new 80gig Hard drives and neither of them would format correctly...what fixed my problem was that some of the RAM wasent properly seated...since most of the time its an easy project check the RAM for proper seating...sometimes when a computer has been running for awhile RAM especialy "chip creep"..

 

[sparkintine]

(Sorry for the Double post)

Or if you can just try the harddrives in a different computer then see what happens

 

[AV1611]

I tried another computer altogether. One hard drive was just plain old DEAD. The computer couldn't see it at all. The other saw the Hard Drive but said it wasn't accessible. That it was either unformatted or damaged.

AV

 

[BadBigBen]

Hi there, well it sounds like your drives electronics are fried... the only way I know how to retrieve the data is to switchout the electronics with a exact same drive... bare in mind that this does not always work (it depends on how the electronics manage the hardware etc.)...

and the other way that might get your data back is to go to a professional data retrieval company, they have many ways to access damaged media... but it's expensive and should only be an option when the data on the drive is very important...

Ben