200GB drive not functioning... am I screwed??

[Codeloss]

So, I just got this new hard drive from Dell about 2 weeks ago, it had been working fine, then suddenly, earlier today, trying to access certain files on it was causing my system to freeze up. I tried reinstalling the drivers for the controller card, to see if that was it, and it seems like things have gotten worse. If there is any way I can save some of the files on this drive, I really need to... there is (was) some pretty important stuff on there.

When I try to access the drive from explorer, I get "E:\ is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect." In fact, the drive label isn't even showing up any more. It just says "Local Disk" now.

Norton Disk Doctor tells me "Unable to access drive E:. The volume does not contain a recognized file system."

When I run CHKDSK from a command prompt, it starts with the "verifying files" bit, and gets to 94%, then starts with "File record segment 43140 is unreadable." and it keeps saying this over and over, increasing by 1 each time... 43141, 43142, 43143, and so on... I'll let it run for a while and see if it does anything else.

So, does anyone have any ideas here? I have heard putting drives in a freezer to cool them down enough to recover data from them before they heat all the way up again. Would that possibly help in this situation? I am desperate!

Thanks!

 

[vetplus40]

I cannot help much, but I think the freezer would be a very bad idea.
When the drive warms up to ambient temperature, condensation will collect inside the hard drive. Condensation inside electronic componenets is not a very good idea.
There used to be companies that specialized in retrieving data from defective drives. Depending on the value of the info, this might be an option.

 

[Codeloss]

Can anyone recommend some good recovery software, preferably freeware or functional shareware? I downloaded the demo of something called "Restorer 2000", and it can see the files on the affected drive, but can't do anything because it is shareware. So I am feeling a little better--at least it seems there might be a chance I can recover my stuff.

 

[rbV5]

So, does anyone have any ideas here?

Try taking it off the controller and hooking to your onboard IDE.

 

[Mark R]

The drive is damaged.

If you want to have any chance of recovering the data, then disconnect the drive, and leave it disconnected until you have chosen a well-known and effective recovery program, which should be installed onto another drive.

You could try the freezer trick, sometimes it apparently works - but you may end up worsening the drives condition and making any further recovery impossible. The same advice goes for using freeware or similar recovery programs - they could potentially damage the data during the recovery (particularly as the drive is malfunctioning). Use a program that is known to work well (there are several around).

Don't forget that you will need another drive with sufficient capacity to copy the data onto. Most recovery software will not restore the drive to a working state - but will instead copy the files off.

The thing you need to ask yourself - is how valuable is the data? Would it be less hassle simply to replace the drive with a new one, and recreate all your files from scratch?

 

[Codeloss]

Can anyone recommend software that supports partitions larger than 137GB? My drive is (or was) formatted as one large 200GB partition. I tried R-Studio and it seems to have trouble with my drive (locking up while scanning the drive around 80%)

rbV5: I don't think my motherboard supports 48bit addressing for hard drives-- should I try this anyway just to see that it is not a problem with the controller card? Can this cause further damage to the data?

Thanks for the replies everyone.