Hard drive corrupt - need help!

chrismox · 26 Dec 2008 at 20:25

I've got a 1tb Samsung sata drive that has developed a problem...

I started Windows today and it said that the drive needs to be formatted before it can be used.

I haven't formatted it because it's full of data that I'd love to get back.

Any thoughts?

EDIT - the BIOS only reports it as a 33mb drive! I assume it's broken, therefore beyond saving...?

Brian Stuart · 27 Dec 2008 at 09:39

Put the drive in a second PC as a slave and see can you extract the data that way. If the second PC can't see the drive then try using software such as GetDataBack for NTFS to recover.

chrismox · 27 Dec 2008 at 13:13

Thanks for the ideas. My second pc is elsewhere at the moment so will try that at some point.

I tried GetDataBack and it found nothing due to the fact that it sees the drive as only being 33mb in size!

Most of the stuff on there I can get back but there were holiday photos from the last 5 years that may be lost forever

I fear the worst...

Amnesia · 27 Dec 2008 at 16:11

check bios settings just incase some settings have been tampered with.

swinnie · 27 Dec 2008 at 17:12

Try a Linux Live CD, such as slax and mount the hard drive in there and see if you can copy the files elsewhere i.e. another drive, and then format the drive.

What about a chkdisk?

chaosophy · 27 Dec 2008 at 17:39

For the live/boot cd route you could look at Trinity Rescue Kit, which is linux based but built for recovering windows PCs, or UBCD4WIN, which also has various recovery and disk tools. Some of the tools listed might be worth a look on their own.

chrismox · 27 Dec 2008 at 22:04

Thanks for all the suggestions. I've tried pretty much everything here and nothing seems to be able to defeat the broken drive.

I've resigned myself to its death and will send it back for replacement and set about trying to replace everything on it.

Cheers.