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IBM Deskstar failed - Can I save anything?

R

rw120555

Golden Member
I seem to have joined the legions of those who have a failed IBM Deskstar -- in my case a 60GB 60GXP. Luckily, most of the stuff is backed up to tape or CD but there are a few recent files I would like to retrieve. Is there any inexpensive utility out there that might do the trick? I have Norton Systemworks, but can't seem to get anywhere with it.

The bios recognizes the drive. IBM's dft software returns "bad sector" and "Defective device" messages. Various other utilities also claim there are errors, or say the the drive is not formatted. WinXp slows to a complete crawl when the drive is enabled, and you keep on hearing these little noises over and over.

Also, IBM's software recommends I "Erase disk", which, as the name implies, will erase everything. Needless to say, this doesn't excite me, but if I do that is it likely the drive will come back to life? And if it does come back to life, is it likely to stay alive? Or should I just RMA it? I've only had it since August.

Thanks for any tips. RW
 
Difficult.

Place it in another machine where you won't have to run the OS from this dead drive. Boot up from the other drive, and see how much you can retrieve.
 
Thanks AndyHui. Alas, it is already the 2nd HD and not the boot drive. But, I may try it in another machine just for the heck of it and see if I get anywhere. RW
 


<< Also, IBM's software recommends I "Erase disk", which, as the name implies, will erase everything. Needless to say, this doesn't excite me, but if I do that is it likely the drive will come back to life? And if it does come back to life, is it likely to stay alive? Or should I just RMA it? I've only had it since August.
 >>



I had a 60GXP fail too (but I didn't have most of my work backed up 🙁).

I certainly wouldn't trust Erase disk, even if the drive does come back to life I wouldn't trust it (it died for a reason the first time and that error may or may not reoccur). You could do what AndyHui suggests but I wouldn't expect that to gain much. My advice would be to RMA the drive and be consoled by the fact that you had most of your data backed up.
 
I had same problem and unfortunately I did what DFT suggested and ran the 'erase disk' utility. This fixed everything but had to reinstall the lot.
I bought a new HD after that as it had happened previously and using the IBM as a backup drive.
 
Millsy - Can IBM refuse to RMA it unless you do the erase disk? Even if it works, I don't know if I would ever feel comfortable using it again.

btaki -- I haven't found Lost and Found but I have found a few other utils that claim to recover files from damaged HDs.

One thing I find odd -- WinXP just slows down dramatically when the defective HD is hooked up. We're talking minutes here to get a response to a mouse click. I assume it is bound and determined to access this disk, but I wish it would give up until I specifically ask it to. Makes me skeptical that I'll be able to get any program to work. I wonder if there is any way around this, or if a Win98 machine would do better. RW
 
You can RMA but they will try that as soon as they receive your HD and most probably send the same one back to you.
 
Millsy -- yuck! I was afraid of that. If the erase disk bit seems to work, this HD will go into a less mission critical spot. I wonder if there is any chance I am just being overly paranoid here, maybe it will be fine. RW
 
I bought six of the 30gig version just under a year ago. One failed completely without warning and another is starting to have problems. Was getting some strange behaviour then all of a sudden windows found some problems, rebooted itself, and then ran scandisk and "fixed" some fragments. Ended up that I could not access anything. Decided to wipe an start over. During the format it made the click click tap noise in two different areas for around 2 minutes. Called IBM and they suggested the erase option. My question is what caused the bad areas to begin with??? Unit was just fine the last few times I formated when I was changing OS or doing major hardware changes.
 
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