OS crash, trying to recover HD content

[DJ Zaki]

WELL...

PC: WINXP PRO
HD: 80GB

my main HD decided to go beserk after my pc restarted by itself with a corrupted floppy of a Win98 BootDisk (I didn't even know it was in there). As I wonder why the hell I have this black screen still, and Windows still not up, I keep pressing buttons...after 30sec, I realize that that stupid evil floppy was still inside! I take it out and restart. Then, BIOS thx to its S.M.A.R.T. HD system check, tells me that the harddrive is bad and I need to back it up. Well shit. It won't run WinXP, after I finally got it running after many safe-mode tries, the system is very unstable, and opening pretty much any programs causes the OS to crash. I throw a little 4GB HD in the PC with a clean WinXP SP2 in there so I can look at the content of the messed up HD. There was 75GB of stuff on there. I kept deleting and deleting up until what I absolutely wanted to save...about 20GB. Anyway, I tried to burn the stuff on CDs...and it keeps crashing. So I try to move the files from my corrupted HD to my external 80GB HD and it won't let me on most the files! It says "bad sector, cannot move files"

I tried doing error-checking, only to have the PC crashing. I *REALLY* want to save this stuff! What do you guys recommend to do in this situation?

 

[dariob]

If the data that you want resides on bad sectors, you may be screwed. You could throw some money down for some recovery software like Easy recovery pro:

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

There is a free trial which will show what you could recover if you bought the prog.

If you dont have luck with that, you may have to pay tons of cash to send in the drive for professional off-site recovery.

 

[oldpablo]

Supposedly this helps recover partitions as well as doing other "Partition Magic" style things. I think its a great program (have it at work).

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/partition-recovery.html

I don't know to what extent the recovery works, have never used that aspect of it. Give 'em a call, its definitely cheaper then the link above if it works.

 

[AchTuNG!]

Why not just use your backup copy?