Dead HDD

Cemetery · 14 Jun 2019 at 21:41

Just checking on the off chance someone has any ideas. My pc stopped booting a few weeks back & through trial & error I found it was one of my data drives causing the issue, a 300GB SATA drive. Unplugged the pc boots fine but with it in it fails to load into windows even though it has no boot files on it.

I have hooked it up as an external USB hdd which allows the pc to boot while connected but the drive isn't really detected. I can see it in disk manager but it only shows as 3 gigs or so & is inaccessible. It won't let me do anything with it (from memory it said it wasn't initialized). Diskpart doesn't see the drive & any attempts to either format or rebuild the MBR etc have met with no success.

I have downloaded various tools to try & read the disk but none of them have been able to read anything...I am assuming I need to just accept the data on there is gone (other than the stuff I had backed up) but thought I would ask here just in case anyone had any genius ideas.

APM · 14 Jun 2019 at 22:12

You could try booting into a Linux distro ,hook it up to that and see if anything else appears.

Ubuntu can be run from a usb stick for example and doesn't need a full install.

Cemetery · 15 Jun 2019 at 15:18

Worth a shot ta.

an0nym0us · 17 Jun 2019 at 06:26

Further to the Ubuntu live disk recommendation, whilst booted up in Ubuntu live, you could also try to clone the drive using the dd command:
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19141/clone-a-hard-drive-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd/

Be carefull though, the dd command will overwrite the contents of destination folder/drive. If you're not familiar with how the dd command works, I'd suggest disconnecting any drives that have important data on, just in case you select the wrong output drive.