Secondary Hard Drive Failure

[SNMINC]

Greetings to all,
Yesterday my secondary harddrive (80gb sorry I've forgotten the manufacturer) went down. When my PC boots up (win XP) I get a hard disk 1 not found error. The Bios is set to auto detect both hard disks. yet when i run Partition Magic Vers 7 it detects the secondary hard drive but says all 80 gb are bad. As my secondary hard drive holds the library for my Ipod I'd like to recover the files if possible.

Thanks for reading this far and can anyone advise me on my best course of action?

Many thanks,
S & M

 

[Diddyman]

Does windows see the drive, so that you can run a scandisk on it??
The other thing you could try is to right click on My Computer and select "Manage" look for "Disk Management" and see if the Hard Drive is seen their..

Let us know what happends when you try these and I'll try to help further if I can..

Cheers
Diddyman

 

[SNMINC]

Many thanks for the quick response Diddyman alas neither Windows explorer nor the Disk Management sees my secondary drive (F

Any ideas where I go from here?

Thanks

 

[Freestone]

Hopefully sme data recovery tools can help. There are many, so I'll list only a few.

Freeware, with limited success reported by forum members:

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Not free:

Many users have reported success with GetDataBack at

http://www.runtime.org/

Other:

http://www.active-undelete.com/

http://www.partition-recovery.com/

 

[projector1]

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery:
great tool and free
i have used this and it has recovered more data than tools i had to pay for.
You could try using the drive in another pc if have access to one
another great tool is

http://ebcd.pcministry.com

this also has harddrive testing tools

 

[SNMINC]

Many thanks to all those who have offered assistance. Here's my latest sitrep: I couldn't use PC Inspector as it's incompatible with NTFS (sorry I forgot to mention it earlier). I downloaded and ran the Emergency Boot up CD, It's a very impressive package unfortunately it didn't see my secondary drive at all.
I then disconnected my primary drive and reset the secondary's jumper to make it the primary drive. The Bios reported a failure on Hard Disk 0 and 1.
Finally I placed my hand over the defective harddrive whilst the PC was rebooting, I didn't feel or hear any movement. It transpires the PC was switched on (although not in use) when the power tripped out at the fusebox.



Is there anything else I could try or is it fit for scrap?

PS I checked last night and it's a Maxtor drive are they prone to this kind of failure as this drive was replaced a few months ago after a similar experience @#!?

Thanks again

S & M