"Your disk is not Formatted" Error.

[stephenkall]

Hello, Folks.

At first, I have to apologize, because my English is very poor.

Let's get on it. I have an Western Digital hard disk.
It's a WD Caviar 310000 103727-002 10.0GB 5400 RPM HD
It has been used with a Compaq Deskpro computer. Its Compaq Spare is 320662-001.

(An identical hard disk drive is this one, shown here:

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/Western-Digi...65094783QQihZ004QQcategoryZ168QQcmdZViewItem)

This HD was using a FAT32 system, with only one basic partition, and Windows 98 was installed onto it.

Recently, during some sort of storm, we had a blackout here. And after that, this HD came up with strange behavior.
The major problem is that I need some e-mails stored in Windows\Application Data folder, but everytime I try to access this folder, I get an "Your disk is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" message.

I tried many recovery tools, such as ontrack data recovery system (a.k.a. tiramissu in older versions), powerquest lost and found and others. None of them brought my idx files back, but during the Ontrack Easy Recovery's scan, I DID see some of the files shown in the status bar. But when I looked at the folder, there wasn't anything usefull.

Do you guys know anyway to help me with these files?

What else should I do?


Thank you from now!

Best Regards,

Vinicius

 

[ptdd]

yes, Data Recovery software can help you, Please see:

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/recover-raw-drive.htm

 

[786687786]

if you have no suceess sofar with recovery software then there is some thing wrong with drive may be its has bad sector or has some problem with firmware

 

[stephenkall]

Thank you, but I still can't read the data I need.
I think there must be bad sectors on the drive.

Can any lab recover it even if it's physically damaged?
As long as it's a very old hard drive, I don't know if it already has auto-parking technology. I think when my house blackened out, perhaps the arm could have hit the platter.

--
Vinicius Valls
"IRC is just a multiplayer notepad."

http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~vinicius_valls

 

[Santei]

No, unfortunatelly data from physically damage HDD can not be recovered.
have a tried any recovery utilities?

 

[stephenkall]

Yes, I tried many recovery tools, but without success.

Anyway, thank you all!

--
Vinicius Valls
"IRC is just a multiplayer notepad."

http://www.comp.ufscar.br/~vinicius_valls

 

[TechXYZ]

Just wanted to add in case if it's interesting for someone...

Data from bad sectors can still be retrieved in many situations. For those of you who are interested in getting deeper into this subject there is a whitepaper that explain these processes in details:

http://www.deepspar.com/pdf/DeepSparDiskImagingWhitepaper3.pdf

 

[Santei]

it sounds very interesting,
i will definetly look through (but, not today).
Thanx a lot.