Hdd failure

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Guest

Is there any possibility that I can recover my XP installation from my Maxtor
hdd that has just failed. i.e. a application that can access the drive in a
'gentle way' just to recover any data on it before I bin it?
 
Lee, do a google search for a Data Recovery Utility or Program. There are
a few free ones out there. How good they are
I don't know. Recovering your XP Install is another story.
 
Are you certain your hard drive has failed? Really certain?

Whether or not you can recover anything depends on how, exactly, your
hard drive failed. For example: Does it no longer power up? If so you
can bring it to a data recovery company, but be prepared to eat
sandwiches for a few months.
 
LeeG said:
Is there any possibility that I can recover my XP installation from my
Maxtor
hdd that has just failed. i.e. a application that can access the
drive in a 'gentle way' just to recover any data on it before I bin
it?
Click to expand...

If you are really sure the hard drive has failed - it is making bad
noises and/or isn't seen in the BIOS and you've run tests to determine
that it died - then no, there is no way to get data back with software.
You will need to send the drive to a professional data recovery company
like Drive Savers (my preference) or Seagate Data Recovery. General
prices run from $500USD on up. Drive Savers recovered all the data on a
failed laptop drive for one of my clients and it cost $2,700. He
thought it was worth the money; only you know what your data is worth.
I understand that some insurance companies are now covering data
recovery charges under "Loss of Intellectual Property" so check with
yours.

Drive Savers - http://www.drivesavers.com
Seagate Data Recovery Services - https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/

Malke
 
LeeG said:
Is there any possibility that I can recover my XP installation from my Maxtor
hdd that has just failed. i.e. a application that can access the drive in a
'gentle way' just to recover any data on it before I bin it?
Click to expand...


The last time I had a hard drive start to fail and Ghost would not image
it I used Spinrite from grc.com to repair the drive and then used Ghost
to create the image. I transferred the image to a new hard drive and
everything was fine. Spinrite will not work if the drive has totally
failed but it will recover a lot of bad sectors that other programs
won't touch. I have been using it since the DOS era and never had any
problems with it.
 
At POST I recieve the warning that the drive is faulty via the S.M.A.R.T.
system and it won't go past the POST. If I disable the S.M.A.R.T. then I can
get past POST to my multi-boot menu but if I select my XP installation then
the m/c sits there trying to retrieve data from the faulty HDD. If I remove
the faulty HDD then everything runs smoothly. I had started to notice a
couple of days ago that my XP seemed a bit slower but nothing seemed to
indicate that the drive was to blame. Dskchk's and defrags failed to detect
any bad sectors.
 
LeeG said:
At POST I recieve the warning that the drive is faulty via the
S.M.A.R.T.
system and it won't go past the POST. If I disable the S.M.A.R.T.
then I can get past POST to my multi-boot menu but if I select my XP
installation then
the m/c sits there trying to retrieve data from the faulty HDD. If I
remove
the faulty HDD then everything runs smoothly. I had started to notice
a couple of days ago that my XP seemed a bit slower but nothing seemed
to
indicate that the drive was to blame. Dskchk's and defrags failed to
detect any bad sectors.
Click to expand...

There is no way to retrieve data from the failed drive via software.
Send the drive to a professional data recovery company such as Drive
Savers (my preference) or Seagate Data Recovery. General prices run
from $500USD on up. Drive Savers recovered all the data on a failed
laptop drive for one of my clients and it cost $2,700. He thought it
was worth the money; only you know what your data is worth. I
understand that some insurance companies are now covering data recovery
charges under "Loss of Intellectual Property" so check with yours.

Drive Savers - http://www.drivesavers.com
Seagate Data Recovery Services - https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/

Malke
 
As a quick work around to try save you the money of data recovery services, you could try installing the HDD in an other machine as the SLAVE HDD, and if it does work you will be able to see your HDD contents and back it up using that machine.

From there you could then put it back in the original machine and try FDSIK and formatting for a fresh reinstall sometimes that can bring HDD back to life, or you could create an image from the slave and see if you can save it that way.

Also i had a simlair problem with a Maxter HDD (the same drive im using now) and all i did was tell the BIOS what drive it was manually and it works like a dream and saved everything.

With HDD there are load of things that can go wrong.

You did say that you got to a menu that asked which installation you wonted to boot, that info is normally keeped in a MBR (master boot record) thats accessed from your HDD so it must have been able to read something from the HDD.

Can you access Safe mode??
 
Reading between the lines it seems that your drive powers up and runs,
but some of the data on it is unreadable. That's good news, believe it
or not, because as long as the drive is operational, you can probably
get at least some data from it.

The first thing I would do is to call the company that made the drive
and ask for their advice. They are in the best position to help you.
Even if you have to pay for the call, this is your data we're talking about.

The company may suggest you try this: Put your drive into a second
computer, so it's not the boot drive, and use the copy of Windows on the
good drive to read the data on the bad drive. If you can do that, backup
as much as you can from the bad drive to the good drive.

There are repair tools you can use, like Steve Gibson's SpinRite, but I
would not try any repair procedure without talking to the manufacturer
first. You want to be absolutely sure you're doing the right thing.

Rub Salt In The Wound Department: See my sig(nature).
 
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