Hard Disk recognised in BIOS but not in XP disk manager after disk failure.

[Al Truscott]

Hi All,

I had my laptop hard disk crash on me a week or so ago and I am now
trying to recover the data from it. I have replaced the drive with a
new one and now have the broken one a Toshiba MK4019GAX IDE 40GB
connected to my desktop which detects it in its BIOS but will not
detect it in disk manager. I have found a few XP utilitys from web
site http://lists.gpick.com/pages/Hard_Disk_Tools.htm
that also find the disk but again will not let me access it or address
to read the sectors or data on it.

I have seen websites that say they can fix disks that appear in the
BIOS but wont be addressed by OS's due to some sort of damage but they
want £500 to £1000 for this recovery service, Ive only lost about 3
months of data so I really dont want to have to pay this.

Has anyone been through this sort of problem themselves and could
offer any tips on my best course of action.

Many Thanks
Alex T
England

 

[Guest]

TRy booting to xp cd,recovery,then typeiskPart See if its detected,if so
press Esc key,then type:CHKDSK D: /R D: being the faulty drive,when its
thru type:EXIT Also,press enter key for password.You can also go to run,
type:cmd In cmd typeiskPart Then type:list disk Then:list volume
See if it shows,type:HELP For all cmds

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi All,

I had my laptop hard disk crash on me a week or so ago and I am now
trying to recover the data from it. I have replaced the drive with a
new one and now have the broken one a Toshiba MK4019GAX IDE 40GB
connected to my desktop which detects it in its BIOS but will not
detect it in disk manager. I have found a few XP utilitys from web
site http://lists.gpick.com/pages/Hard_Disk_Tools.htm
that also find the disk but again will not let me access it or address
to read the sectors or data on it.

I have seen websites that say they can fix disks that appear in the
BIOS but wont be addressed by OS's due to some sort of damage but they
want £500 to £1000 for this recovery service, Ive only lost about 3
months of data so I really dont want to have to pay this.

Has anyone been through this sort of problem themselves and could
offer any tips on my best course of action.

Many Thanks
Alex T
England

Here are a few links to tools that might let you recover your paritions:
http://www.restorer2000.com/r2k.htm (to restore NTFS partitions - seems to
work well)
http://www.hddrecovery.com.au
http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz (has NTFS undelete tools too)
http://www.runtime.org/ (GetDataBack)
www.acronis.com (RecoveryExpert)

After successful recovery you might want to use this opportunity to
review your backup strategy. The iron rule of computing says that
all important files must be backed up to an independent medium at
least once a week. Many people ignore this rule until they get hit.

 

[Joep]

Try DiskPatch from www.diydatarecovery.nl to restore your partition(s).

 

[D.Currie]

Hi All,

I had my laptop hard disk crash on me a week or so ago and I am now
trying to recover the data from it. I have replaced the drive with a
new one and now have the broken one a Toshiba MK4019GAX IDE 40GB
connected to my desktop which detects it in its BIOS but will not
detect it in disk manager. I have found a few XP utilitys from web
site http://lists.gpick.com/pages/Hard_Disk_Tools.htm
that also find the disk but again will not let me access it or address
to read the sectors or data on it.

I have seen websites that say they can fix disks that appear in the
BIOS but wont be addressed by OS's due to some sort of damage but they
want £500 to £1000 for this recovery service, Ive only lost about 3
months of data so I really dont want to have to pay this.

Has anyone been through this sort of problem themselves and could
offer any tips on my best course of action.

Many Thanks
Alex T
England

Do a search on the internet for data recovery software. There are plenty of
free ones, and more that you'd have to pay for. Only you know what the data
is worth. Some of the paid ones will have trials you can use to see if it
can see the data or not before you buy.

Whatever you do, DON'T run any kind of disk checking software or other
utilities like defrag or anything else on the drive until after you've
determined whether the data is recoverable or not. The more you write to the
drive, the more chance you have of messing things up worse.

 

[jeffrey]

HI,

Try Restorer2000, its not free, but a very good program at recovering data
off of hard drives that lost their partition table, MBR. For Restorer2000
Pro which does FAT32 and NTFS, is like $50, for FAT 32 or NTFS is cheaper,
think $30 or $40. I was able to recover data on a hard drive that had a
serious crash on me. They have a demo you can try out and see if it will
see your data. The demo only allows you to recover 64kb files or less, the
full version will enable you to recover all of it. But I recommend trying
the demo to see if it will read your drive and see the data.

Jeff