Hard Drive Issue - Please Help!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dan
  • Start date Start date
D

Dan

One afternoon, about four months ago, I was ripping CD
tracks to my second hard drive (F) and suddenly, I was
confronted with an error message in the system tray
reading "Delayed Write Failure" followed by some
gibberish about how only some or none of the data was
saved to the drive. Anyhow, I shut down for the
afternoon, and upon returning to it later that evening,
the F drive was no longer visible in My Computer, and
therefore, I lost complete access to my highly precious
MP3 collection. I experiemented and noticed that both
BIOS and Windows' Device Manager see the drive, but
nevertheless, I have run out of ideas and patience. The
drive is a Western Digital 40GB 7200rpm, and is still
under it's 3-year warranty. The OS is XP Pro. Is there
perhaps an inexpensive, yet secure program I could use to
recover my highly precious MP3 collection on a supposedly
dead HDD before sending this back to Western Digital for
a replacement?

PLEASE SEND ALL RESPONSES TO (e-mail address removed) AND LABEL
SUBJECT LINE AS 'HARD DRIVE'

Thanks,
Dan
San Francisco, CA
 
Dan said:
One afternoon, about four months ago, I was ripping CD
tracks to my second hard drive (F) and suddenly, I was
confronted with an error message in the system tray
reading "Delayed Write Failure" followed by some
gibberish about how only some or none of the data was
saved to the drive. Anyhow, I shut down for the
afternoon, and upon returning to it later that evening,
the F drive was no longer visible in My Computer, and
therefore, I lost complete access to my highly precious
MP3 collection. I experiemented and noticed that both
BIOS and Windows' Device Manager see the drive, but
nevertheless, I have run out of ideas and patience. The
drive is a Western Digital 40GB 7200rpm, and is still
under it's 3-year warranty. The OS is XP Pro. Is there
perhaps an inexpensive, yet secure program I could use to
recover my highly precious MP3 collection on a supposedly
dead HDD before sending this back to Western Digital for
a replacement?

PLEASE SEND ALL RESPONSES TO (e-mail address removed) AND LABEL
SUBJECT LINE AS 'HARD DRIVE'

Thanks,
Dan
San Francisco, CA
Click to expand...

Here are a few tools that might help:
http://www.runtime.org/ (GetDataBack)
http://www.restorer2000.com/r2k.htm
http://www.hddrecovery.com.au
http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz
www.acronis.com

Seeing that your collection of .MP3 files is "highly precious"
(your words), this might be an opportunity to review your
backup strategy. Hard disk space is very cheap nowadays -
a weekly backup to a removable 80 GByte disk would cost
surprisingly little.
 
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