What's wrong with this Hard Drive?

[involatile]

Yesterday, my PC failed to boot and I figured that the hard drive has gone bad. So, I removed that hard drive and put a new one, and reinstalled windows with the help of recovery disk. Now that the computer was running fine, I tried to recover data from the bad hard drive by adding that in slave mode. But as soon as I add that bad drive, the computer fails to boot (even though BIOS detects both hard drives). I can feel the disk spinning and looks normal. Is there any way to mount this disk on any computer and recover any data from it?? Please help...

 

[edfair]

You may have a boot setor virus. Some hang the system during the hard drive search.
On earlier systems you could recover with fdisk /mbr but haven't tried it with later OS versions.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[involatile]

Boot Sector virus? Hmmm... No wonder the computer was behaving awkwardly for some time now. It always failed to shutdown cleanly (have to power down by pressing the power switch)... Free AVG anti-virus failed me...

Anyway, Can someone please tell me how to fix the boot record, if the PC won't boot with infected Hard disk present?? Even, it will not boot from CD unless I remove that hard drive... Please, some ideas...

 

[edfair]

Might help if you told us what OS you are on, whether you have any boot loader in operation, and in general what other problems you may have noticed.
The power down problem may be unrelated, and you may have other problems than a virus. That was just the first thing that popped into my mind. There is other corruption to the boot sector that will do this without it being a virus.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[Rufusman]

YOu may also have bad sectors in the MFT. Is the drive making any strange noises on boot?

RM

http://www.pcbsearch.com.au

 

[Rufusman]

Also, You might try to run the diagnostics program from the manufacturer. Seagates Seatools also diagnoses the OS as well, so that might tell you more (if it is Seagate)

RM

http://www.pcbsearch.com.au

 

[involatile]

This PC is running windows XP. I'm not aware of any boot loaders running. Also, It doesn't make any strange noises.

One interesting thing is, as long as the bad hard drive is present, the computer won't even load the windows setup disk in the CDROM drive. CDROM spins but nothing happens.

I managed to load knoppix using knoppix CD. But it failed to see the Hard drive. Somehow BIOS is able to see it, no one else can. Thanks for your help...

 

[involatile]

Finally I tried a software called "Data Rescue PC" by RecoverSoft and it's able to locate the hard drive. But I haven't yet tried to recover the files, as I didn't have a spare hard drive to copy to. Anyway, that's a big improvement over other softwares I tried. Thanks again...

 

[Brona]

Hi,

In case of lost data recovery Active@ Undelete can be used. It's restore methods are extremely awesome, you can experience it yourself!

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