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Dead Hard Drive?

W

weiv0004

Senior member
Hello all,

A friend recently told me about a computer problem. She has an old Dell Dimension 8300 and when she turns on the system she gets a "disk read error" the system posts, I can enter the setup and change boot sequence, bios settings etc. but when it actually goes to start windows, it ends with a black screen and some sort of "disk read error" message requiring restart.

She doesn't have a restore CD, I've tried repairing with an xp install cd. Nothing seems to work, so finally I pulled the Hard Drive and hooked it up to my computer. My computer did detect the hard drive, but lists the properties as 0 GB available of 0 total GB and there are no files on the drive.

I assume it's dead. Am I wrong? Anything else I should try?

She's not concerned about the computer itself, she just wants to get her photos of the drive. Think Photorec would work?

Thanks for any suggestions!
 
Go to the drive makers website and there is usually a software tool you can download that will check the drive and report problems.
 
This isn't really a good time to do disk diagnostics. First priority should be to get the data off. You want to put as little stress on the drive as possible, and to recover the most important data first.

If the drive is actually recognized by another PC, then you can try any of several data recovery programs. I've used those by http://runtime.org and by http://dtidata.com . There are other good ones out there, too. The ones I mentioned cost about $80 for the license to actually recover the data.

If software recovery is unsuccessful, then you likely have a serious hardware error and need to consider how much money the pictures are worth.
 
^^^ What rebatemonger said. If there is a hardware issue like a drive head scraping across the plattes, each time you use the drive will result in more data loss. Get the data off as fast as you can.

For repair, I use spinrite. It was $80 or so, but I bought it years ago and have used it on several drives so it's paid for itself several times over. This only works if the drive is visible by the BIOS and has to be hooked up directly to the motherboard by IDE or SATA (no USB). It runs through the disk and fixes errors. It has rescued previously unreadable data for me several times.

If that doesn't do it, your friend will have to decide if the pics are worth sending to one of those hard drive recovery places like drivesavers. They start at $500 and can easily climb into the thousands. They literally take apart the drive in a clean room and attach it to custom readers to get the data off. drivesavers has a virtual tour on their site which is kinda neat.

I had a very good friend of mine have a hard drive crash on her. She lost all of her son's baby photos. They are irreplaceable. She still has the drive on a shelf in the event someday she can afford to send the disk off to one of those places and maybe get it recovered. So after this is done, remind her to have a good backup solution...
 
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