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Solved: Hard Drive Failure (Almost)

1107 Views 4 Replies 3 Participants Last post by coderitr, Dec 30, 2006

coderitr

Discussion Starter · Dec 30, 2006

Sometime last week my hard drive stopped being bootable. When the BIOS went to boot the hard drive, the computer reset like I has pressed the reset button. With this hard drive, I had kept the operating system on a smaller C: partition and my data on the "rest of the disk" partitioned as D: so that if something like an operating system corruption occurred I could format C:, reload the OS and all my data would be safe. I've always known that this wouldn't protect me from a hardware failure and I think that finally came up to bite me. Several times I tried installing Windows -- the BIOS would recognize the disk and Windows setup could partition it and format it but when it came time to boot it, no joy. First, I replaced the motherboard and had the same problem where the computer would reset when the BIOS tried to boot the hard drive. So today, I bought a new hard drive and installed it. Everything is working now so I connected the old drive to the SATA connector and booted. Windows shows only one partition on the drive as 129 GB with the rest of the space as unpartitioned free space. Am I SOL? I know that Windows XP pre SP2 only recognizes the first 129 GB of a large drive like this and I guess when the setup was working on the drive it overwrote the partition table? I'm desperate. My entire music collection was on that partition along with some documents that I'd really like to have back if I could get them. I know that there are companies that specialize in data recovery but it's pretty expensive, right? I've been issued and RMA from Seagate so I'm going to get a new drive but they're explicit in the statement that any data on the existing (defective) drive is just gone. Is there any way to recover the partition table and restore my data?

Thanks in advance.

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Scorpion

· #2 · Dec 30, 2006

It's risky trying to repair the partition table unless you know exactly what you are doing. Download (to your NEW hard drive) and run THIS program. It will recover any data on that drive if the drive is still readable. I've used it many times with success.

There is a simple tutorial under Help at the top if you have any problems (or press F1). Just access help, then English, then Tutorial, then (in your case), click #4 (ignore the sector settings, just set them at min and max if different). Point it at the failed drive and run it. When it's finished, you will have 4 folders on the left...Root, Deleted, Lost and searched. You should find what you need in lost I expect. You can then move them over to the new drive easily.

It WILL take a while to run....

Scorp.

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Scorpion

· #4 · Dec 30, 2006

Ahhh c**p....thanks John. Fixed!!

S.

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