Hard Drive failure:(

drumdogg · 20 Jul 2011 at 23:24

My Samsung hard drive has died i think. When booting up it first said "read disk error". I ran the windows recovery disk and it didnt fix it. I also used the manufactures hard drive software to try and fix it and it didnt work either.

Then it started to say "S.M.A.R.T bad sectors, backup and replace" when booting up and when i try to run the hard disk tools it says it can no longer find the drive!!

I just want to be able to boot up and recover some of my files.

Was thinking about doing the freezer trick with the hard drive to see if it might work.

Any Suggestions please??

EGuitarStar · 20 Jul 2011 at 23:29

I pretty much doubt freezer method will help here, you have bad sectors freezing wont do anything here, your best bet is to slave that drive to another machine via sata or usb and use a data recovery program to get what you need asap before it is completly messed up. You maybe able to read the data without a recovery program but expect to lose some data if they are within the bad sectors.

drumdogg · 20 Jul 2011 at 23:34

I tried using it as a slave but as long as that faulty drive is connected it still says "S.M.A.R.T bad sectors, backup and replace"

Philtor · 21 Jul 2011 at 01:06

Is it detected in the BIOS ok? If so use another PC and grab TestDisk, then boot from it on your PC.

drumdogg · 21 Jul 2011 at 12:06

Ok I have got the hard drive to boot up and looks to be working alright. Would that be a permanent fix or will the hard be slowly dying? I say this cause I have a new drive coming and don't know whether to start fresh on the new drive.

If it was the hard drive hardware that's failing could I duplicate the old drive to my new one instead of starting over fresh again?

CrimsonAvenger · 21 Jul 2011 at 12:07

Backup everything now!!!!!!

I would start fresh on the new drive

drumdogg · 21 Jul 2011 at 12:31

Ok cheers, thought that would be the best bet