Harddrive failure, whats best to do?

lego · 24 Feb 2009 at 00:02

Today i went over a friends who's pc wouldn't get past the xp loading screen (would restart). Checked the ram/psu ect and all is fine. i noticed the HDD would only access for about a second every sort of 3 seconds.

Next step was to try it in another machine, when trying to access it windows would say it needs a format. However this drive was from the pc connected to a Rowland cutting machine (for vinyl) and has 3 years of work on it so format is out of the question.

So what are my options, do i try the freezer trick and if so how do you go about this, or are there any applications out there for data recovery.

any help welcome

PS i've already told him he's a plank for not backing it up, it's only a 30gig drive and he has another 4 pc's on the network!!

radderfire · 24 Feb 2009 at 00:07

This might start you off on your quest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive_recovery

Have you fully identified the type of drive involved?

Rgds

radderfire · 24 Feb 2009 at 00:09

If I Google hard drive recovery tools I get lots of offerings too.

Rgds

ChrisLX200 · 24 Feb 2009 at 00:15

I'm not convinced the drive is bad, more likely at this stage that the XP installation is bad. Will it boot into Safe Mode?

lego · 24 Feb 2009 at 00:22

ChrisLX200 said:
I'm not convinced the drive is bad, more likely at this stage that the XP installation is bad. Will it boot into Safe Mode?

It's the drive, have brought it home and tried it in my pc too and vista wont open it either

ChrisLX200 · 24 Feb 2009 at 00:24

lego said:
It's the drive, have brought it home and tried it in my pc too and vista wont open it either

Does it show in Disk Manager?

If you put an XP disk in the computer and open the Recovery Console you can use 2 commands:
fixmbr (repairs the Master Boot Record)
fixboot (repairs the boot sector and replaces the system files there)

Disconnect your own drive when you do this and just have the faulty disk connected (safer that way). Otherwise, you'll have to append parameters to tell the utils which drive to operate on.

lego · 24 Feb 2009 at 00:55

Thanks chris will give it a try.