Hard Drive Failure....Recover Recovery Patition

[Drobbins]

Hi All,

I have had a Acer Aspire laptop in to do some work on, the prognosis the end user gave me was that it had a virus so i tried to boot the machine and it just kept rebooting itself, what i have done so far is booted into Ultimate Boot CD for windows and repaired the MBR which allowed me to get into vista itself also from UBCD i ran HDTune to check the hard drive and it came back with 1.0% of the hard drive with bad blocks.

Inside windows everything takes a really really long time to process, opening my computer for example takes a good 5-10 minutes that is if it dosent crash, i first thought that it might be memory but running memtest86 says their are no errors on the memory, virus scan has been run using AVG from UBCD and that said the disc was clean so the only thing i can think of is that the hard drive is either dead or about to die.

My second issue is that the hard drive has a recovery partition that holds the OS Install how would i install this onto the new HDD!!


Does anyone else have any input.
Cheers
Rich

[quikgoner]

The hard drive sounds pretty knackered. You mentioned running the scanner on HDTune. Have you tried running a "chkdsk /r" on the drive to attempt to sort out any fixable errors. You can also try a "sfc /scannow" to repair damaged system files.

To recover your boot partition you could use a partition manager and copy it to another medium/drive. If its too cumbersome due to windows running slow you could try something like gparted.

[Drobbins]

The hard drive sounds pretty knackered. You mentioned running the scanner on HDTune. Have you tried running a "chkdsk /r" on the drive to attempt to sort out any fixable errors. You can also try a "sfc /scannow" to repair damaged system files.

To recover your boot partition you could use a partition manager and copy it to another medium/drive. If its too cumbersome due to windows running slow you could try something like gparted.

Thanks for the reply, i had to swap the HDD out in the end i hooked the disk up to a USB caddie and linked that to a Linux machine to copy the data off it but it would just hang on the read and would crash the OS only working again once the disk had been removed.

chkdsk /r was my first port of call, this did nothing.

Unfortunatley this level of recovery is above my head and i passed the disk back to the user to take to a recovery company should that be what they want to do.

Thanks for your reply
Rich