Hard Drive Recovery?

Steve2000 · 17 Jul 2008 at 19:13

My Maxtor Diamondmax hard drive has been having some issues this week. It started clicking, then immediately blue screening after that. This became more frequent, until eventually I arrive at today, and now it won't boot into Windows. The XP loading screen appears, then as soon as it's done loading it reboots.

I've read around and some think it's a RAM issue. Well to test that I've tried booting from a couple of my old IDE drives, they both work fine. So it's the drive that's gone bad by the looks of it.

Now, I've just ordered a new Seagate 500GB 7200.11 from OCUK. When this arrives and I format it and install XP, will I be able to put the Maxtor in with it to drag and drop the data from it to the Seagate? I've done this before, but not with a dodgy drive. I think it might just be a boot issue, but I could be wrong.

jbloggs · 17 Jul 2008 at 22:36

If the HDD is NOT faulty, then yes, but if it is faulty then no.....to be absolutely sure whether it is faulty or not, download and run the manufacturer's diagnostic utility....

edscdk · 18 Jul 2008 at 12:55

If the drive boots and gets stuck weather its clicking or not at least some of your data will be recoverable.. do a selective copy of the data you want once you have the new drive.. if it get stuck try a file at a time.. if a file you really want hangs everything up reboot and try again..

While you are waiting for the new drive dont power the old one on incase it only has limited life before it totally dies!!

bledd · 18 Jul 2008 at 12:58

backup backup backup

edscdk · 18 Jul 2008 at 13:09

No one bothers with backups! Dictionary definition of a backup should be 'Something you wish you had done once you realise your data cannot be recovered'

bledd · 18 Jul 2008 at 14:33

so it seems

drak3 · 18 Jul 2008 at 14:37

edscdk said:
No one bothers with backups! Dictionary definition of a backup should be 'Something you wish you had done once you realise your data cannot be recovered'

philjohn · 18 Jul 2008 at 16:03

I'm somewhat paranoid with my data, RAID 1 array for data (yes, I know RAID isn't about backing up - it's about redundancy, but it insulates me somewhat froma drive failure), external firewire disk for "nice to have locally" stuff and then Jungledisk (offsite backup stored on Amazon S3) for the "if I lost this data I would be screwed" - family photos, accounts, important work etc.

We've had a few servers with disks go bad, so I know first hand how much of a PITA disk failures are and do all I can to insulate myself from them.