[amtbr]

I searched for answers, honest I really did.

A friends computer has one IDE HD that will not boot, its a XP machine. When booting, it goes through the bios then it says HD not found. I tried using the dell recovery disk and it shows in dos that the drive is there, but empty. I am going to take out the HD and stick it in my machine, so my question is, what kind of tools should I download? I really don't want to buy any data recovery software, google is full of ads for them. Any help is greatly appreciated. I am mainly looking to get whatever data there is and transfer it to my HD.

 

[Dman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by amtbr I searched for answers, honest I really did. A friends computer has one IDE HD that will not boot, its a XP machine. When booting, it goes through the bios then it says HD not found. I tried using the dell recovery disk and it shows in dos that the drive is there, but empty. I am going to take out the HD and stick it in my machine, so my question is, what kind of tools should I download? I really don't want to buy any data recovery software, google is full of ads for them. Any help is greatly appreciated. I am mainly looking to get whatever data there is and transfer it to my HD.

If the computer can't see the HD at all its likely the controller board on the HD is dead, no way to fix that other then moving the plates to another chasis, and most people don't have the clean room to do that. The dell recovery disk might be showing a ram disk, not the actually hard disk. There is a utility called spinright that you can use to recover data from a drive as long as its not physically damaged.

 

[Vlasov_581]

does the hd make any weird noises?

 

[amtbr]

Not it doesnt, which leads me to believe its not some kind of mechanical meltdown

I'll look into spinrite.

 

[killabytes]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dman If the computer can't see the HD at all its likely the controller board on the HD is dead, no way to fix that other then moving the plates to another chasis, and most people don't have the clean room to do that. The dell recovery disk might be showing a ram disk, not the actually hard disk. There is a utility called spinright that you can use to recover data from a drive as long as its not physically damaged.

Actually if the board is dead you can just swap the board with a exact model. I've done that several times. Works great actually.

But software wise I just used Getdataback for a customer. Worked fairly well actually.

 

[error10]

PhotoRec.

 

[amtbr]

OK, I spent half the day messing with this damn thing. I tried spinright, photorec, and getdataback. I think its toast. Heres what I found: in my bios, it detects the HD as maxtorARES C64K and blinks. I tried messing with all the jumpers, nothing made it stop blinking. Is this just a subtle way of the gigabyte bios telling me the HD is dead?

All the apps did nothing, spinright wouldnt event attempt to fix it and photorec refused to recognize the drive properly, it kept telling me it was an 8 meg HD when I had 2 HD's and then I tried just putting in the damaged one and it finally got the size right. But that didnt do me any good since I didnt have space to put the damaged files.

I'm about to use this thing for target practice. Anyone have any tips? Thanks for the recs so far!

 

[-=sT3V3=-]

try replace the board on the drive, If you can get one...
Otherwise, BBQ

 

[error10]

When you take that drive out to shoot it, bring along your video camera.