Hey Guys
My sister's hdd has just died today and I've spent the best part of the day trying to recover some files off it for her (photo's etc)
Originally when I checked the drive it wouldn't boot windows from it because the system file was missing (i tried both normal and safe mode), i figured i'd just stick the XP disk in and repair windows but unfortunitly the windows disk wouldnt give me an option to repair (the whole press r bit). I then connected it up as a slave drive in another PC to run a chkdsk and was presented a lot of "File Record Segment xxxxx is Unreadable" errors. After googling I found that this basically means the drive is dying/dead. I confirmed this with powerMax (its an 80gb maxtor drive btw) which failed the long test within minutes.
Windows detects the drive but won't let me access it, so instead i tried a few partition recovery programs to see if they'd let me retrieve some files off the damaged hard drive, all the tools I've tried all seemed to work great BUT unfortunitly it can't retrieve anything out of documents & settings which is all I really need to backup and instead gives an error about it being unreadable....bloody typical
I've tried accessing it from dos using an NTFS boot disk so it can see the partition (it just hangs when detecting the drive) and i've tried various programs on Hiren Boot CD to repair the partition
Does anyone have any more suggestions on what to try to retrieve at the very least the "My Pictures" folder?
Thanks
My sister's hdd has just died today and I've spent the best part of the day trying to recover some files off it for her (photo's etc)
Originally when I checked the drive it wouldn't boot windows from it because the system file was missing (i tried both normal and safe mode), i figured i'd just stick the XP disk in and repair windows but unfortunitly the windows disk wouldnt give me an option to repair (the whole press r bit). I then connected it up as a slave drive in another PC to run a chkdsk and was presented a lot of "File Record Segment xxxxx is Unreadable" errors. After googling I found that this basically means the drive is dying/dead. I confirmed this with powerMax (its an 80gb maxtor drive btw) which failed the long test within minutes.
Windows detects the drive but won't let me access it, so instead i tried a few partition recovery programs to see if they'd let me retrieve some files off the damaged hard drive, all the tools I've tried all seemed to work great BUT unfortunitly it can't retrieve anything out of documents & settings which is all I really need to backup and instead gives an error about it being unreadable....bloody typical
I've tried accessing it from dos using an NTFS boot disk so it can see the partition (it just hangs when detecting the drive) and i've tried various programs on Hiren Boot CD to repair the partition
Does anyone have any more suggestions on what to try to retrieve at the very least the "My Pictures" folder?
Thanks
