Oh noes, hard drive failure

[Craig321]

Hi,

Well, PCs don't like me at all

Recently my SATA and on-board LAN broke on my motherboard, so I had to send it back, the people who sold it to me have now had it for 32 days. Pretty ridiculous. They put the phone down when I try and ask what the hell is going on and then don't answer it when I call back.

Anyway, enough on them, onto my problem:

Booted up my second PC this morning, another day of using super lightning speed 1.5GHZ

Windows kept taking me to the boot options screen, I tried safe mode, "go back to last known good settings", and normal boot. All of them displayed the loading screen, the blue bar went across 2 or three times, the PC then went back to post. It kept looping.

I've been into the recovery console and ran CHKDSK /R - it found errors but it said it could not fix them (CHKDSK stopped at around 62%).

I rebooted after that and after post I got warnings that S.M.A.R.T has detected a failure and I should get my stuff off the hard drive ASAP.

I stuck the hard drive in the server PC as it'd take too long to transfer my files over network.

The server PC (Win 2k3 Server) detected the hard drive but I can't access it at all.

Now I'm stuck

Is there any way I can get into the drive for a while so I can get my files back please?

Thanks,
Craig.

[dave87]

How old is the drive and how important is the data?

[Craig321]

Hmm, it's an old IBM Netvista 1.5GHZ - very old - not sure on exact years.

Some of the data is very important to me - I do alot in a month.

[dave87]

Not the machine, the hard disk that went wrong (unless that was one from your old machine).

If its data relating to business - you may be best off having the data recovered professionally, but that costs. If its personal stuff that can be replaced, then running a recovery utility may be your best bet - I did have one that worked well for me, I'll see if I can dig it out

[Craig321]

Not the machine, the hard disk that went wrong (unless that was one from your old machine).

If its data relating to business - you may be best off having the data recovered professionally, but that costs. If its personal stuff that can be replaced, then running a recovery utility may be your best bet - I did have one that worked well for me, I'll see if I can dig it out

The machine is as old as the hard drive, tis why I was saying how old the Netvista is

I'd appreciate it very much if you could find the data recovery program for me please

The data on there isn't important enough to spend a lot of money getting a professional to recover it, mainly some rather large PHP scripts I have recently written, a load of new bookmarks, and some other stuff.

Thanks,
Craig.

[DeludedGuy]

I hear Norton Ghost is brilliant.

[Craig321]

I hear Norton Ghost is brilliant.

Yes yes, I know I should have backed up, but this is my second PC, it was never meant to be used as my main and I didn't expect to use it so long as my main PC so I did not have a backup plan for it.

All is sorted now though, managed to run a chkdsk on the disk using another PC, that gave me access & I've managed to recover all my stuff. I'm gonna boot it in it's PC tommorow, it should work, but I'm not gonna trust it.

[blueball]

I love a happy ending

Had similar prob recently that drove me to poetry:

http://forcespoetry.co.uk/poemdetails.asp?ID=380

[Craig321]

Thanks for the help everyone

I love a happy ending

Had similar prob recently that drove me to poetry:

http://forcespoetry.co.uk/poemdetails.asp?ID=380

Hehe, good poem