Corrupt XP Hard Drive

Hi all, One of my friends brought a DELL pc for home use but as usual 2 days outside of the warranty they started to get problems and the system would not boot to XP. The system had worked fine before and no hardware or software changes had been made. I have had a look at this but the system would not boot past the windows xp screen. I loaded the recovery console and tried to do a CHKDSK to fix any errors however, it said that there were to many errors and cannot run CHKDSK. I have tried to partition the hard drive and install windows again but it states that the C:\ drive is corrupt and cannot be fixed.

They saved all there holiday pictures to it and then deleted them from the camera so they wanted to try and recover these. Even when the recovery console starts it does not give me the option to log onto the Windows XP, looking at the C:\ drive shows that there is no C:\windows directory or documents or settings folders. I am stuck with what to try next and whether any of the pictures could be recovered easily, I know that we could take the hard drive to a disaster recovery place but they would like to keep the cost down. Does anyone have any ideas or have I missed anything that can easily fix it? Any help would be really appreciated.
Cheers
Mark

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Comments

jim_stasz

Rather than messing around with that hard drive and taking the chance of totally corrupting it I would just install a second HD, jump it as master, jump the old one as slave, and install XP on the new master. Pull the data they want to save to the new drive or usb drive.

xevious

Mark,

Jim's post is definitely the next step. Attach the drive as a slave to a working XP PC and see if that works.

However, if the drive letter doesn't show up or is inaccessible from explorer - I would definitely give 'Getdataback' a try. You can download a trial copy from www.runtime.org.

I ran this on a failed HD once and was able to see word docs I deleted years ago.

Chivalry1

I agree. Set it as a slave drive on a working PC. And attempt to recovery the information operating system discovers the HDD. And copy the information to the working system HDD. If that does not work: Hook it up to a Mac via a USB cable.

Jiggsaww

hmm somebody deleted some pics from my laptop.........am gonna try and use dis 2 recover them........

Mark11

Thanks for everyone's help, I am going to buy another hard drive and try what you have suggested. Cheers Mark

Mark11

Hi, I finally got round to installing a new SATA hard drive, I installed XP onto it and then the software to recover it. All seemed to be going well until 17% in to recovering the hard drive the system rebooted. It then displayed a message saying that it could not find drive 1 which was the original corrupt hard drive. Even if you put this hard drive in another machine it displays the same message. I guess the hard drive is not usable anymore. Is that right?

RussS

That could be possible - however there is something you should do first before you start to loose hope.

Connect that drive as the SLAVE on your SECONDARY channel. Have no other drives connected except for the one with your OS and the drive to be worked on.
Quite often when a drive is on the way out it kind of screws up the signals and even if jumpered as slave can be trying to change to master or Cable Select which usually pulls the system down.

mobri09

Freeze that sucker, then do what Russ said. Thats what we usually do at work just to have enough time to recover the data.

Mark11

Hi, thanks for all you help and suggestions but it has not worked. Any other ideas or shall I give up?

Silver Bullet

If you have another drive that is exactly like the one that has failed, then you can take the controller off of the good one and put on the bad drive. You will want to make sure that the drives are the same make/model though.

mobri09

Did you freeze that drive for a few hours? After its frozen, follow the steps Russ talked about.

Ricka182

What does freezing a drive do?I think I've heard of this before..... I have an older maxtor drive that has a little physical damage preventing any system from recognizing it, but it still spins and all. I didn't want to pay all the money just to recover mostly Mp3s, but if I could freeze it to get them I would.

Mark11

Yep I had it in the freezer for about 4 hours.

Jiggsaww

wait wait wait like physically freeze it.........like put it in a freezer and let it freeze.......whoa never heard that b 4........wat does freezin do?

Claud Murdock

jim_stasz wrote:

Rather than messing around with that hard drive and taking the chance of totally corrupting it I would just install a second HD, jump it as master, jump the old one as slave, and install XP on the new master. Pull the data they want to save to the new drive or usb drive.

I agree here, but if that doesn't work type "fixboot" in the recovery console, and see if that does nethang. doubt it will, but anything at this point is worrth a shot, right...?

I have also heard of, and done the HD in the freezer trick, and it DOES work magically, idk how, but it does, it basically freezes the clusters and sectors in the current "state" their in, and when thawed, it tricks the clusters into thinking that its on the last good mode boot. this is what ive heard, sounds crazy, and senial, but it DOES work, gj on that lol

mobri09

A lot of times why an old hard drive will fail is the internal parts becoming worn and the heads starting to make actual contact with the platters. Freezing the hard drive for an hour or so will make the metal contract enough so that the heads are lifted back off the platters and your data can be read from it. Of course, once it thaws back out, the heads will crash back on to the platters and kill it some more, so this is only a last chance soution to get important data off the drive.

Ricka182

Hmmm, I wonder if I should try this...I only have one drive, and I would hate to kill it furthur. But the reward of being able to recover my data so easily......what to do.....

jescab

FREEZE it.................

Plantwiz

mobri09 wrote:

A lot of times why an old hard drive will fail is the internal parts becoming worn and the heads starting to make actual contact with the platters. Freezing the hard drive for an hour or so will make the metal contract enough so that the heads are lifted back off the platters and your data can be read from it. Of course, once it thaws back out, the heads will crash back on to the platters and kill it some more, so this is only a last chance solution to get important data off the drive.

Exactly!

It also helps when the drive is getting too hot, similar reasons as above, and it's a last ditch attempt to retrieve data. But it works.