Hard Drive Imminent Failure

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I just replaced a friends hard drive after BIOS message to back up data and
replace hard drive. HP recovery CDs worked great on the new 160GB drive. I
then connected both 160GB drives in parallel with new as master and old as
slave hoping to be able to recover data. The old drive is recognized in
Windows Explorer and Device Manager says it's working OK. However, when I
click on the drive in Windows Explorer I get a message "drive not formatted"
"format now ?". New drive has WinXP SP-2. Old drive has WinXP SP-1. I was
able to run Panda's SAFE CD to scan the old drive partially, but the scan
stopped. It read and scanned several files before hanging. Both drives
partitioned NTFS. Any suggestions before we turn this drive over to the
disaster recovery experts who charge big bucks?
 
HMT said:
I just replaced a friends hard drive after BIOS message to back up data and
replace hard drive. HP recovery CDs worked great on the new 160GB drive. I
then connected both 160GB drives in parallel with new as master and old as
slave hoping to be able to recover data. The old drive is recognized in
Windows Explorer and Device Manager says it's working OK. However, when I
click on the drive in Windows Explorer I get a message "drive not formatted"
"format now ?". New drive has WinXP SP-2. Old drive has WinXP SP-1. I was
able to run Panda's SAFE CD to scan the old drive partially, but the scan
stopped. It read and scanned several files before hanging. Both drives
partitioned NTFS. Any suggestions before we turn this drive over to the
disaster recovery experts who charge big bucks?

Looks like a case of "...not quite in the nick of time". The drive has
evidently crashed. The lesson here is to always run regular backups as
this material would have been used as both the permanent archive of the
material that was on the hard drive and also used to restore all of the
lost data, information, picture, etc., files and folders. Good luck with
diaster recovery.
 
- Forgot to mention I was able to boot this drive with a Win98 Emergency Boot
Disk to check Partition Info with FDISK. FDISK read the format as NTFS and
saw both c: and d:(hp recovery) OEM partitions. Why can't WinXP see it's
formatted?

:

I just replaced a friends hard drive after BIOS message to back up data and
replace hard drive. HP recovery CDs worked great on the new 160GB drive. I
then connected both 160GB drives in parallel with new as master and old as
slave hoping to be able to recover data. The old drive is recognized in
Windows Explorer and Device Manager says it's working OK. However, when I
click on the drive in Windows Explorer I get a message "drive not formatted"
"format now ?". New drive has WinXP SP-2. Old drive has WinXP SP-1. I was
able to run Panda's SAFE CD to scan the old drive partially, but the scan
stopped. It read and scanned several files before hanging. Both drives
partitioned NTFS. Any suggestions before we turn this drive over to the
disaster recovery experts who charge big bucks?
 
HMT said:
- Forgot to mention I was able to boot this drive with a Win98 Emergency Boot
Disk to check Partition Info with FDISK. FDISK read the format as NTFS and
saw both c: and d:(hp recovery) OEM partitions. Why can't WinXP see it's
formatted?

All fdisk will tell is whether or not a partition exists or not and
the type of partition. Fdisk cannot tell whether the partition is or
is not readable or the file contents that are in the partition.
 
HMT said:
I just replaced a friends hard drive after BIOS message to back up data and
replace hard drive. HP recovery CDs worked great on the new 160GB drive. I
then connected both 160GB drives in parallel with new as master and old as
slave hoping to be able to recover data. The old drive is recognized in
Windows Explorer and Device Manager says it's working OK. However, when I
click on the drive in Windows Explorer I get a message "drive not formatted"
"format now ?". New drive has WinXP SP-2. Old drive has WinXP SP-1. I was
able to run Panda's SAFE CD to scan the old drive partially, but the scan
stopped. It read and scanned several files before hanging. Both drives
partitioned NTFS. Any suggestions before we turn this drive over to the
disaster recovery experts who charge big bucks?

Might be worth trying Spinrite on the drive before calling in the
experts, at $89 a fraction of what they would charge you.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
 
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