Dead Hard Drive, Want to Recover data.

[marcoval]

So the Hard Drive on my wife's computer died this weekend. It was spinning and spinning but not making any progress until it finally just won't even be recognized by XP. Any options for recovering the data? I could care less about the hard drive.

 

[wseyller]

Put a new harddrive in and install your OS to get up and running then add the old hard drive as a second hard drive. Boot to the OS of your new hard drive and you should be able to browse through the old drive as long as it isn't totally destroyed. You may have some bad clusters. Some of your data may be ok, some possibly might not.

 

[Askalon]

If that does not work, the drive board may be dieing and this is what is causing the issue. What you can attempt is to find another drive with the same specs (and I mean the exact same) and verify that the PCB board is the same id as well.

Swap the boards and test it out. May or may not work, but worth a shot if you need the data.

 

[marcoval]

I have tried hooking it up to a 2nd computer as a 2nd drive with no luck. The BIOS will recognize the drive, but when we get into XP, it will be gone. XP also takes quite a bit longer to load with this drive attached.

 

[wseyller]

Trying going to device manager to see if its listed under "Disk Drives" or see if it is disabled hardware.