Hard drive hit the dust.

[nonamortica]

Hello all,

I hope you can help me here.

My hard drive went caput. I booted up and got a message that it needed to run scandisk. It found some bad clusters and moved some stuff around. I decided to defrag the disk at that point, did so, got a message that there were parts that could not be moved. I should have backed up my data at that point but foolishly I did not.

The next time I went to boot up, I could not. The machine just went around in circles, attempting to boot over and over, with some blue message screen flashing too fast for me to read. I attempted to do a repair of XP, could not get the machine to give me that option, it only wanted to reformat the disk.

I went out and got a new hard drive and installed it as the master, with the old drive as the slave, hoping that I would then be able to read the old drive and save some of the data. Unfortunately when I attempt to read the old drive I just get messages that the drive needs to be formated.

Is there a way for me to get past that and find my data? Or is it just lost forever? I was hoping once I had the machine up and running again that there would be a way to access that drive.

I do have backups but not a recent one.

Any insight as to what is going on here would be appreciated.

Nona

 

[CheesePoofs]

There are professional services that can recover data from almost any hard drive, but asside from using one of them there is not much you can do that I know of.

 

[suicidalpigeon]

service like that costs a bundle. you're probably stuck with the last backup you did. get a seagate so you dont have to worry about this again.

 

[nonamortica]

Yup, my new one is a Seagate. I have had good experience with them. Wouldn't get anything else.

Unfortunately my last backup was a while ago. I am trying to look at it as a fresh start, but I just feel really foolish for neglecting to back up.

Sure can't afford the services at this point



Nona

Originally posted by: wafflesandsyrup
service like that costs a bundle. you're probably stuck with the last backup you did. get a seagate so you dont have to worry about this again.

 

[Nocturnal]

Attempt to hook your drive up as a slave drive in your computer and or use an external enclosure to see if you can retreive any data off of your hard drive. You may want to try the freezer trick to see if it will let you save any info off the drive. Otherwise it's off to Drive Savers which means $$$.

 

[OdiN]

As a cheaper alternative to drive savers:

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

This program works well - I use it at work and it is usually able to pull data off of a drive in this state - as long as there are no hard mechanical failures.

It's not cheap, about $500 for the pro version. There is a lite version for $89 but it only allows you to recover 25 files per session. If you don't have a ton of stuff you can try that.

Also there is a free version that will show you the files it can recover, it just won't recover them. That's a good test to see if the program can do it and will be worth the money.


Oh and yes...Seagate and Western Digital are the current best drives out there.

 

[John P]

There are several file recovery programs that you can download and try for free. It will actually show you what files can be recovered, but you have to pay for the software to complete the recovery. I had the exact same problem you are describing and I tried several different programs - the one that ended up working was File Scavenger 2.1. Looks like 3.0 is the current version.

Download it here

It was well worth the $45 for me.

Good luck.

 

[nonamortica]

Thank you! This worked beautifully. :thumbsup:

You are right it is well worth it.

Nona

Originally posted by: John P.
There are several file recovery programs that you can download and try for free. It will actually show you what files can be recovered, but you have to pay for the software to complete the recovery. I had the exact same problem you are describing and I tried several different programs - the one that ended up working was File Scavenger 2.1. Looks like 3.0 is the current version.

Download it here

It was well worth the $45 for me.

Good luck.