Storage Drive Failed - HELP!!

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SleeplessIncubus

Gawd
Joined
Dec 28, 2006
Messages
582
Little bit of a story before I begin....

I had installed a beta copy of vista on my primary drive....the 30 day "trial" had expired so I was going to dual boot xp and a vista home premium retail that i just bought.

on the original vista install i was locked out because like i said the 30 days expired and i never entered a serial number. i was able to transfer a couple things from the primary drive to the storage before I did the format.

once that was done i just wanted to see one more thing before i opened my retail box so I installed the beta one last time. upon doing a clean install i noticed that my storage drive was no longer there. i figured it might have been a driver issue because i installed x64 this time....the install went ok and when vista was loaded the storage drive still wasnt detected.

so i restarted the comp and was going to look in the bios to see what was going on. when i pressed del to get into the bios the screen just hung. turned off the comp and the same thing...just hung. i then checked to see if a cable had come loose...everything looked good and still couldnt get into the bios.

finally i did an ctrl alt del and when the comp booted back up i got into the bios where the storage drive wasnt being detected. i switch the power and sata cable with the primary (which i knew was working) to the storage, rebooted doing ctrl alt del and would not be detected. so now im guessing that the drive has failed.

so now i unplugged the storage drive and just wanted to install xp back on the primary. Did a boot from the cd and it would only get to the part where it would say press F8 to install drivers for the hdds and then it would just hang. i have no idea what is going on. i am such an idiot for not backing up that data. can anybody help me out??

i contacted a couple data recovery places that i found on google and im sure its going to cost lots of $$$ but i need those files....theyre invaluable. has anybody used any company before for recovering lost data - if so which one(s).

btw the storage drive is a WD5000KS SATA drive. I just got it like a month ago from ZZF....i have never had a WD drive fail on me EVER. I am going to buy a external SATA enclosure tomorrow just to see if its the drive or not.

any suggestions/help is appreciated :) :(
 
What I would do is connect the drive to a system running XP, then run 'getdataback' from runtime.org on the storage drive (dont have xp installed on/running from the storage drive)

It should show you whats able to be recovered before you have to buy it, its well worth the $$, and for me its paid for itself a few times over fixing other folks problems:D
 
dbwillis said:
What I would do is connect the drive to a system running XP, then run 'getdataback' from runtime.org on the storage drive (dont have xp installed on/running from the storage drive)

It should show you whats able to be recovered before you have to buy it, its well worth the $$, and for me its paid for itself a few times over fixing other folks problems:D
Click to expand...

great thanks for the reply. thing is i dont have a comp with xp running...all i have is a laptop which is the reason why i was going to get the external enclosure. if i can get that to work then i guess ill see what is there (if anything). if not then ill try the program u recommended.

thanks!
 
well it definately looks like the hdd crashed. i went out and bought a external usb sata enclousure and neither the laptop with xp or my desktop with vista would show the drive. it was detected in the device manager as a usb mass storage device but wouldnt come up as a drive in "my computer".

i am running the getdataback program and its showing tons of errors and bad sectors. i am getting messages saying error 117 in HD129 during ReadLba: LBA=xxxx, CHS=-1x-1x-1, Cnt=64. Not sure what those messages mean but im sure it cant be good.

once the program is done I'll post back with the results. I had a data recovery company call me back about their services but I missed the call. ill see how much they are going to want to get the data recovered and im sure its not going to be cheap.

also what should i do about replacing the drive? i believe it has either a 3 or 5 year warranty from WD and its only 2 months old. i bought the drive from newegg and i think they have a year replacement policy. should i just send it back to WD and get a new one (it'll probably be a refurb though) or should i see if newegg will send me a new one.

thanks :) :(
 
holy crap! i just spoke with a CSR from drive savers and they want between $1800-2700 depending on how much they can recover. :(
 
does anybody know what those errors mean in getdataback?

error 121 in HD129: during ReadLba: LBA=xxxxx. CHS=-1x-1x-1, Cnt=64
 
its just errors its found....it should also be showing you things it can recover...right?
 
it just shows thousands of errors....hasnt shown one thing that can be recovered yet.

i spoke with someone from the company that makes the software and they said those errors are basically that the drive is physically damaged. any data that is in the sectors with the errors are going to be un-recoverable she said.

i spoke with 2 data recovery places today and the cheapest was $2200. i just emailed 4 more companies and just waiting to see what they say.

i was hoping to pay around $500....i mean $2200 is just a little too much. I found a couple dvds and a usb storage drive that had a lot of my older files.....but i am missing most of my pictures from 2006, all of 2007 and a lot of very important emails that were stored in .pst files.
 
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