Hard drive repair programs

Sven_Lee

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 1, 2004
Messages
212
I recently had my Seagate Baracuda 120gig hard drive take a crap on me. The OS still recognizes it in the computer window but I can't open it. It's also slowing down my whole PC. At the moment it's disconnected. I was wondering if anyone could direct me to a good hard drive repair program that might be able to salvage the drive and the files I have stored on it.

Also, I was given a hard drive by a friend that has an OS installed on it. I was wondering what the proper procedure would be to format the drive so I can use it as a secondary drive on my pc. I know nothing of dual-booting operating systems. So all I know is if I hook it up it will boot under that operating system instead of my own. So, could anyone direct me to a program that will format this drive so I can use it for additional storage on my PC? Thank you.

-Sven
 
Also I'd like to add that I'm running windows vista. As it turns out, now that I've tried reconnecting the Seagate drive that took a dump on me, Vista is not recognizing it as a drive anymore. I think when I had XP installed, it did recognize it. This is really frustrating because I have a lot of important information stored on this drive. If anyone could help me by pointing me in the right direction I would appreciate it. I already tried Ultimate Boot CD and used the SeaTools diagnostic program to try to diagnose it. In simple mode it completed about 10% and failed. In advanced scan it detected about 99 problems and failed. Any ideas?

And I still can't figure out how to get this Western Digital drive my friend gave me to format and be usable as a regular storage drive. Please help!

Thank you

-Sven
 
Ok I figured out how to get the Western Digital drive to work, I had to set it up properly in my bios. Now just the corrupted drive issue.. I'm broke at the moment and can't afford to pay some company to recover my lost data so I'm hoping someone can point me to a good free program that will hopefully do the trick for me. Thanks

-Sven
 
I tried Spinrite and it won't even let me select the drive to start the test/repair or whatever..

Any other ideas? Anyone? I'm desperate. Thanks.

-Sven
 
Look up Test Disk. I had it restore my partition MBR from a backup so I could access the date on my drive. It's a long shot but a start.
 
I was just wondering what people thought about the spinrite product?

I had a recent HD crash that a maxtor utility I booted into said the drive failed. But after I zeroed the drive it is again working (at least I think its ;)). There wasn't any really important data on it so I didn't mind but now I am thinking it might be a good idea to have one of these tools around in case I need it. But because spinrite is dos based it can have real issues with SATA drives. I know the seatools couldn't see the bad SATA drive but the older maxtor utility could. At $90 it's not one of those tools that I would impulse buy.
 
I recently used spinrite on 2 dead HDDs that I couldn't even boot into windows with. After running level 2 tests on both drives, I managed to boot into windows and recover most of the data on the drives.
 
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