Emf & Wd1600jb Help!!!!

[the prodigy]

In dire need of some advice and guidance, for I am one lost child.

I have 2 hard drives, one 40 GB as my primary and one 160 GB as my slave. I've had the slave for less than a year and it's been in my antec soho fileserver case but constantly being blown by an intake fan at the front of my case. Nothing has ever happened to it before until more recently, the drive has been acting a little wonky. When loaded in bios, it would sometimes list my 160 GB as "WD16008)8)8)8)8)8)8)8)8)8)8)8)8" other times, it would just give me garbage text. But usually a restart would make everything fine again. The first few times it happened, I thought my drive might've been under the influence of a virus and/or spyware, what-have-you but they all panned out fine and my drive seemed to be working optimally. Until yesterday, the damned thing just won't recognize anymore... this was after removing the fan. Bios sees it, XP sees it but as an offline drive (in disk management). Everytime I try to reactivate the drive, my system would freeze. Since then, having the drive in the computer would cause a really long boot up time and the drive just won't work.

I have a LOT of stuff on there that I would like to keep. I'm getting the feeling the fan had something to do with it but I can't tell. I ran the western digital diagnostic tool and no errors. I then proceeded to try installing XP on one of the drives but after the boot disks, it tells me the drive's only 13 GB and that 15 GB's been used up (????) and that the only way to install XP is to delete the 1 partition showing, where in fact I had 4 partitions. All I want is enough time to retrieve as much of my stuff as possible. if I can do that, the drive can screw up all it wants after. It's still under warranty so I could probably ship it back and get a new one, but the stuff in there is uber important!

Sorry about the long story, but had to tell you guys what I did so maybe you can tell me of things I haven't done.

Thanks in advanced!

System specs:
AXP 1800+ @ 2300
NF7-S (locked frequency)
2x256 Corsair black PC3700
1xYamaha CDRW
1xPioneer DVD-ROM
Soundblaster Live! Value
Radeon 9500 @ 9700 softmod

 

[Ice Czar]

Corruption 101 causes
Meta Data Basics
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/DiskPatch.htm potential repair
http://www.quetek.com/prod02.htm recovery

not exactly sure where the initial cause might lay, but your metadata seems to be screwed up, either by corruption or user action, on the brght side, you seem to have access to the drive, a direct scan of the sectors is likely to recover the data, but you need somewhere to write it, trial filescavenger and see what it can recognize, however youll have to purchase to actaully attempt recovery (then verify the files and if they arent valid try it with a more narrow focus)

attempting to repair the metadata in place would be what disk patch is about

 

[the prodigy]

Great! Thanks a lot. I'll give these a try before swapping.