Seagate HD Crash & Can't Recover

[Fiora]

I have a 30 Gig Seagate 7200 HD. I was afraid it had been compromised so I was getting ready to reformat anyway, but I didn't get my information off of it.

One day it was taking too long to shut down, so I turned the power off. Stupid, stupid thing to do. Next time I tried to turn my computer on, it said HD error or no system or something like that. I thought no problem, I will set it up as a slave and get my info off. This did not work.

I set the jumper as a slave and I see it in the windows explorer, but when I click on it, it says "Drive not formatted, Do you want to format". I click on no. I downloaded a couple different programs that was suppose to recover lost/formatted/infected information. I could see files out there so I purchased "Stellar Phoenix NTFS".

It does recover some of the files, but not all of them. I don't know what happened. Isn't there some kind of software that will fix the disk and not just try to recover files.

I have Disk Fix-It Utilities 5. But when I boot to that disk,it doesn't see the HD.

Thanks.

 

[micker377]

Spinrite is supposed to do what you want. Is this data you must have, or can you just re-format and be done with it?

 

[garebo]

This wont help your present problem. But because you mentioned you were afraid that hard drive was compromised, i am thinking you were talking about a possible virus\trojan\malware of some sort. If so, and you are at the point where you want to reformat, can i suggest that you go to the hard drive mfgr website and download the troubleshooting program. Inside that you will find a command to "write zeroes to the hard drive". Suggest you do that before formatting the hard drive. I cant prove it but i think it helps get rid of any nasties. Some nasties can and do survive a drive formatting.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[kiddpete]

I have used getdataback recently, and was very pleased with what it recovered. I have since seen several posts reporting the same thing.

 

[stduc]

I'll second kiddpete regarding getdataback. The demo version will show you what will be recovered before you have to buy it to actually recover the files.