Disk failure

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stephen Puntasecca
  • Start date Start date
S

Stephen Puntasecca

We had a disk become corrupted on a dell 4100 system.
System was running Win XP Porfessional. Dell the mfg of
the equipment snet us a replacement hard drive, whihc
they supported through the formating and setup back ti
Win ME, which was the operating system we were on when we
purchased the workstation from them. We upgraded to XP
Pro, withiut any poblems; but old Word files on that old
hard drive are not accessable. I trid to run drive copy,
making slave and master drives accordingly. but the boot
wuill not recognoze the old drive and it gose into a boot
screen for windows and will not boot at all, whihc is why
we replaced the drive in the first place. Does anybody
know how we can extract these files?? Is there a piece of
softwar outthere that will allow us to get into that disk
(old). Or doi we have to rebuild teh files without any
ability of transferring from old driev to new drive.
 
It sounds like disk failure of the old drive was terminal.. backing up files
to media other than the primary drive has always been recommended for this
very reason..
 
Hi, Stephen.

Are you sure you have the cables and jumpers set correctly when installing
the old drive as a secondary or primary/slave drive? If so, and the drive
is not too far gone, then Disk Management should be able to recognize the
drive and assign a (perhaps temporary) drive letter to each volume on it.
Then normal Copy or Xcopy or other commands should work to recover the files
from it.

You said you used "drive copy". That was the name (actually I think it was
"diskcopy") of a utility that we used to use to make and exact copy of one
drive onto another, "warts" and all. It's different from the DOS and
Windows Copy commands, because it tries to copy tracks and sectors, rather
than files. You ARE actually using Copy, aren't you?

If the drive can be accessed at all, you may be able to use a tool such as
R-Studio (about $80 to download from www.r-tt.com) to recover the files.
And there are commercial data recovery business. I guess it depends on how
valuable the data is, and only you can decide that.

RC
 
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