Maxstore 160GB HDD Unreadable in a Dell

[Graham Brooker]

My daughter's HDD on her Dell Dimension PC crashed and became unreadable
(not backed up of course) - unbootable volume reported. The Windows XP
setup disk could see 3 partitions (2 Dell diagnostic partitions FAT and
FAT32) plus and unknown one (main NTFS partition) - I have not reformatted
or done anything to the disk since.

I installed a new drive and set up the PC and put the faulty one in as HDD 2
but CHKDSK found loads of unreadable consecutive blocks but did also report
it's percentage complete so was reading some blocks. My local PC "expert"
shop had a go and got nowhere saying it was a disk hardware problem - they
did nothing.

Reading various data recovery websites, claims are made for using their
tools in such cases. Is there any point in trying further when CHKDSK
reports unreadable (not just corrupt) blocks. Are there any good tools
available on the market that could be tried at reasonable cost. What about
File Scavenger or instance.

Any suggestions appreciated

Graham Brooker

 

[Guest]

So wait, the new drive is 160GB and it's being reported as unreadable? If
that is the case, if it's an older unit it's entirely likely that the BIOS
won't be able to read volumes of that capacity.

Meanwhile, bad blocks on a hard disk indicate that the read/write heads are
having issues accessing the physical sectors on the platters. Unfortunately,
there is no software program that can fix that. In fact, when you run chkdsk
/r it doesn't fix bad sectors - it locks them down and tries to move the data
stored on them to known working sectors.

Data recovery programs usually can only recover data on a drive that's been
formatted but is still in working condition... so I'd avoid spending money on
them.

 

[Graham Brooker]

Data recovery programs usually can only recover data on a drive that's
been
formatted but is still in working condition... so I'd avoid spending money
on
them.

Thanks Jack for your explanation. I decided to have a go and download the
free trial version of File Scavenger 3.0 to see if it could do anything. It
worked very well and reported good status on all the files I needed. I paid
the $57 registration fee and successfully recovered everything onto a new
HDD.

It seems that s/w was able to skip the bad sectors and go straight to the
bits that worked that still had my data intact. In this instance it was
worthwhile especially as you could look and see for free.

Graham