Need help restoring from (nearly) dead hard drive

[avhokie]

So my 2 year old 200GB PATA drive took a dive a few weeks ago. No clicking noise or anything like that, but Windows doesn't recognize it anymore and when I ran some recovery programs, they seemed to take forever and ran into all kinds of low level errors.

So instead of recovering from the nearly dead drive, I figured I'd do some low level copy onto a new hard drive (just got a 300GB SATA) and then try to run some recovery tools against the new drive.

So a couple of questions for anyone who can help:
1) Am I on the right track or should I be doing something else?
2) Is there a good low-level copy utility? The cheaper the better
3) Any recommendations on recovery utilities?

Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

 

[Severian]

I think I would try running chkdsk /r from the recovery console on this drive first. If you don't know how to do that, simply boot from your WinXP CD, select R for recovery console, then type the above command at the prompt.

I'm assuming you're using WinXP, by the way

good luck

 

[blodhi74]

 

[avhokie]

Originally posted by: Severian
I think I would try running chkdsk /r from the recovery console on this drive first. If you don't know how to do that, simply boot from your WinXP CD, select R for recovery console, then type the above command at the prompt.

I'm assuming you're using WinXP, by the way

good luck

Cool...I'll give that a shot. Thanks!

 

[inveterate]

wrap in 3 different plastic bags simultaneously, and put into freezer. overnight

let it thaught the next morning and boot