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need help to recover data from my hard drive

V

vtecluder

Banned
I got a blue screen message on my dell 600m laptop that windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer, shut down the computer and run chkdsk. I tried doing that and nothing worked. I then ran dell diagnostics on it and found that one of the sectors is not readable. It passed all the other tests but failed the read test giving an error message that the particular sector number is not readable.

What do I do to recover data from this hard drive??
 
If you run chkdsk /f it should flag the sector as bad, and unusable. Unless it's in the system area, it supposed to just be ignored after that.
 
Download the utility offered by the maker of your HD - for that HD model, follow the instructions for installing it on a DOS-bootable disk (or CD) and run it.

It will run sequential read/write test on every block on your HD, identify unuseable or weak blocks, attempt to recover data from the bad blocks and write it to known-good blocks, and lock out the bad blocks from further use. It's your best first-shot shot at recovery.

If still not bootable, with the repaired HD blocks you can attempt an install repair from the Windows CD.

If it reports a lot of bad blocks, don't even attempt to boot that drive again:
- Buy a new HD
- Install Windows on the HD
- Slave the other HD to the new master, and recover as much data as possible.

Hope this helps!

 
data recovery people charge a ton of money for those who must have their data.. i'd love to get into that business.
 
If you can put the drive in another computer as a slave and the drive is recognized (hopefully the drive can still be recognized, just not read) then use a utility called File Scavenger V2. You can download a free demo copy. The demo will search your damaged drive and show you what files it can recover - you have to pay ($35 or so) to actually be able to recover the files.
 
well when I did the diagnostics i found that there is only one block that has gone bad and my bios recognize the hard drive. only i am not able to boot to windows. does that mean i will be able to recover the data. i partitioned the hard drive and all i need is some important things on my D and E drives (each 10GB). Thanks for the help
 
I did the same thing with a laptop I have. I used "FileRescuePlus" I did have to pay like $20 or something for a full version. But theres a lot of freeware out there. It can scan files while in DOS and send them to an area of the disk that allows you to retrieve them.
 
Just take it out and put it into another computer as a slave drive then you should be able to get into it , Another thing you can try it to disable s.m.a.r.t. drive in your bios.I just had a drive do that had bad sectors in it and wouldnt boot up until I disabled smart in the bios.Then I was able to get the info off and ship the hard drive back to wd for replacement
 
I was able to get into it and get the info off yes.I had already taken it out and slapped it into another computer as a slave drive.
 
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