Can this hard drive be saved?

[Bob Feduniak]

My HD crashed (running Vista Ultimate). The screen tells me it has
several bad sectors. It won't boot, and my other machine won't
recognize it when I attach it via USB as an external HD. I'm quite
sure the files are intact, but all the basic approaches ("last good
configuration," "safe mode," etc. have failed). Could anyone suggest
something worth trying before I send the drive out to a commercial
recovery service? Thank you.

Bob Feduniak

 

[David B.]

Run the drive mfg's diagnostic utility on the drive, it may be able to get
it going, keeping in mind that any data on these sectors are already lost
more than likely.

 

[ato_zee]

My HD crashed (running Vista Ultimate). The screen tells me it has
several bad sectors. It won't boot, and my other machine won't
recognize it when I attach it via USB as an external HD. I'm quite
sure the files are intact, but all the basic approaches ("last good
configuration," "safe mode," etc. have failed). Could anyone suggest
something worth trying before I send the drive out to a commercial
recovery service? Thank you.

The early version of Norton Ghost ran from a floppy, and surprisingly,
preserved long file names with the restore.
Some drive mfrs utilities can map out a few bad sectors and
replace them from a pool that exists for this purpose.
Norton Ghost dislikes corrupt disks, but if the drive is visible
from DOS then I'd run the mfrs tools, and if it successfully
maps out the bad sectors, try the DOS version of Ghost to
see if you can preserve what remains.
In fact if the drive is visible in DOS using a DOS Emergency
Boot Disk, then there are several DOS based Drive Copy
utilities.
Commercial recovery is not cheap, and you may get a
list of recovered files, with no associated file names.
A lot hinges on whether the file table is intact.

 

[Guest]

if the diags don't work...bad sectors, virus etc, try (r-tools studio) i had
the same problem 2 months ago, and nothing worked until i tried it, and
recovered 85% of the drive, which is now landfill

 

[dennis@home]

My HD crashed (running Vista Ultimate). The screen tells me it has
several bad sectors. It won't boot, and my other machine won't
recognize it when I attach it via USB as an external HD. I'm quite
sure the files are intact, but all the basic approaches ("last good
configuration," "safe mode," etc. have failed). Could anyone suggest
something worth trying before I send the drive out to a commercial
recovery service? Thank you.

If it has valuable data on it the first thing to do is make a sector by
sector copy.
If you can't do this then you do need an expert to have a look.

 

[Bob Feduniak]

Thanks to all of you for your replies and suggestions. I tried them
all to no avail, and then took the HD to the shop for $75 worth of
testing/recovery attempts. The verdict: for some reason it is
spinning only very slowly, though it appears not to be damaged. So
I'm going to try freezing it overnight and if, as seems likely, that
doesn't do it, give it a proper burial.

Bob Feduniak