Accessing Damaged Hard Drive

[Ed O'Brien]

I'm running XP Home SP2. The subject pc is Win 98.

A friend brought her Win 98 tower round to me as her hard drive would not
boot but kept going into Scandisk.

On checking it and trying every which way, I found so many damaged clusters
that the hard drive is simply unusable. My only alternative seems to be to
connect it as a slave to my pc, replacing the CD-ROM - I don't have space
for another hard-drive - and try and recover her family albums that way.

However, I have not done this before - although I did many moons ago install
a second hard drive on another pc - so any advice, i.e cautionary notes, etc
would be really appreciated.

I am off to bed now (UK. 23.45 BST) but hope to pick up any responses in the
morning.

Thank you all in advance.

Ed

 

[Ghostrider]

I'm running XP Home SP2. The subject pc is Win 98.

A friend brought her Win 98 tower round to me as her hard drive would not
boot but kept going into Scandisk.

On checking it and trying every which way, I found so many damaged clusters
that the hard drive is simply unusable. My only alternative seems to be to
connect it as a slave to my pc, replacing the CD-ROM - I don't have space
for another hard-drive - and try and recover her family albums that way.

However, I have not done this before - although I did many moons ago install
a second hard drive on another pc - so any advice, i.e cautionary notes, etc
would be really appreciated.

I am off to bed now (UK. 23.45 BST) but hope to pick up any responses in the
morning.

Thank you all in advance.

Ed

A better option would be to install the possibly damaged HD in
an external USB drive enclosure or dock and attempt to read it
through that device. This method might protect the HD better
by limiting the amount of possible changes the system bios or OS
might impose on it while attempting to read it. It also leaves a
better opportunity for a professional hard disk recovery outfit
to do a recovery.

 

[Malke]

I'm running XP Home SP2. The subject pc is Win 98.

A friend brought her Win 98 tower round to me as her hard drive would
not boot but kept going into Scandisk.

On checking it and trying every which way, I found so many damaged
clusters that the hard drive is simply unusable. My only alternative
seems to be to connect it as a slave to my pc, replacing the CD-ROM -
I don't have space for another hard-drive - and try and recover her
family albums that way.

However, I have not done this before - although I did many moons ago
install a second hard drive on another pc - so any advice, i.e
cautionary notes, etc would be really appreciated.

I am off to bed now (UK. 23.45 BST) but hope to pick up any responses
in the morning.

OK, I'm not saying this to hurt your feelings but... since you don't
know what you're doing and you don't have equipment to swap stuff in
and out of, have your friend take her machine to a local professional.
Choose someone who does data recovery. This will be data recovery on a
software level and it requires specialized programs and a pretty good
set of computer skills.

*IMPORTANT* - If your friend's data is crucial, she should do *nothing*
more on the machine. Every time you boot a failing hard drive, you are
doing more damage. If the data is crucial, your friend should contact a
professional data recovery company. I prefer DriveSavers
(www.drivesavers.com), but there are others such as Seagate Data
Recovery and Ontrack. I understand that you are in the UK; even though
DriveSavers is in the US they work internationally. I'm sure the other
companies do, too. Professional data recovery services are expensive,
usually starting at around $500USD and going up from there. Only your
friend can decide what her data is worth.

Good luck,

Malke

 

[Ed O'Brien]

Thanks everyone for the advice.And thanks for the tact, Malke.

Ed