INITIALIZING DISK AFTER FAILURE

[Guest]

had a system freeze,rebooted message said unable to start windows because of
hard ware config. Fitted problem disk on second machine ,it is reconised in
the bios /but not under my computer/ in the computer management console/disk
management it reports disk not initialized Can anybody
tell me if the data will be erased if i initialize and the only way to get
the data back is a data recovery company .
thanks HAMMER

 

[pickluh]

First off, before proceeding any further I suggest (if you have a free
drive big enought o hold the data on the bad HDD) back it up (I'd use
Ghost). Then try to rebuild the MBR. This may work. Also if data
recovery is the route you have to go, there is software on the market
(like getdataback) that may be more cost-efficient than a data recovery
company.

 

[Guest]

the drive is only recognised by the bios and disk mangement console so no
software can access it, thanks for your input

 

[Richard Urban]

Initializing a disk that has data on it will "usually" not cause any
problem. I have had this occur a few times and nothing bad ever came of it.

BTW, if you have been doing your backups as you should, it wouldn't be so
much of a question, would it. You would just do it and if anything bad
happened, you would reinstall the files from your backup.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!