Bad HDD - Any Suggestions?

E

elation

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
792
I have a drive that has gone bad for a user. It's a weird situation on this thing though. It starts to boot to Windows (or Safe Mode) but blue screens. It's a Dell and can boot to the diagnostics partition. When you run HDD diags, it says it can't see the hard drive.

I've tried the following:
Booted BartPE - Can see the drive listed as x: but it shows up as blank or not accessible. Therefore, can't run chkdsk on it.
Tried mounting in Linux - no go
Connected to another PC as an external - no go.
Tried UBCD - lots of the apps including testdisk - no go
Tried SpinRite 6.0 - won't see the drive
Tried Recovery Console - didn't work
Tried on a different PC
Swapped the mainboard on the HDD – same problem

Yet it does actually starts to boot up but locks. Only if it had a command prompt like 98 had. What did I miss? :)
 
Have you tried swapping the controller board on the drive yet? Otherwise I think you are going to be SOL.
 
One of my techs put this thing in the freezer for a bit and was able to get chkdsk to run! We'll see how it goes.
 
Shouldn't you copy data before running chkdsk? If the data isn't accessible, would recovery software be a safer bet than running chkdsk first?
 
YellowSnow said:
Shouldn't you copy data before running chkdsk? If the data isn't accessible, would recovery software be a safer bet than running chkdsk first?
Click to expand...

He can't even access the disk to get the data off.
 
If he can get chkdsk to run, he can access the drive with recovery software, right?
 
Try This
Put the drive in a plastic bag, put the drive in the freeze for 12/24 hrs
Pull drive out, Hook up, Pull data off, replace drive
 
protias said:
He should be able to, but if the drive is corrupted, then the data will not be recoverable.
Click to expand...

I'd try it first anyway. I'm just thinking if this drive only has 2 hours of life left in it, for example, spending those last 2 hours running chkdsk will be unproductive. But yes, if a good recovery software program can't access the data, chkdsk would certainly be a next step.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but choosing the option to "Attempt recovery of bad sectors" runs the risk of rendering data unsalvagable (or more data unsalvagable) right?
 
YellowSnow said:
I'd try it first anyway. I'm just thinking if this drive only has 2 hours of life left in it, for example, spending those last 2 hours running chkdsk will be unproductive. But yes, if a good recovery software program can't access the data, chkdsk would certainly be a next step.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but choosing the option to "Attempt recovery of bad sectors" runs the risk of rendering data unsalvagable (or more data unsalvagable) right?
Click to expand...

I wasn't disagreeing with you earlier, I was just merely expounding upon it. I have run across a few times running chkdsk would correct some of the errors, but some of the data could not be recovered. Good thing it wasn't anything that was life and death information.
 
Chkdsk fixed the disk errors and my tech was able to retrieve all of the data. Thanks for the tips guys!
 
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