"Dead" hard drive.

[PVR]

This PC is PII/350/448/WinME. There are two HDs. Drive D is 40 Mb and uses
Disk Manager; it is now dead. One day recently I came in and found the blue
screen (Of Death) with a message that Drive D could not be written to or
read from (I don't recall the exact words). I have tried various rescue
procedures (Norton Utilities, etc but nothing works. The drive is not
recognized during boot.

I have much data on this drive. Is this drive truly deceased? Are there any
other things I can try before I replace the HD (D? My interest is in
recovering the data.

Peter.

 

[David L]

Svend,

Forgive me to divert to different topic on harddisk. You have been a
miracle worker for many people and may have some insights to this
problem.

I am trying to modify XPpro install boot floppy disks (source
Microsoft) to include a firewire driver so the laptop can recognise
external harddisk and install the OS there, instead of the usual
internal harddisk which will be rebuilt from time to time in my case.

Do you know if such schemes can work, and if so where to get a XPpro
(non GUI) compatible driver? I have asked this in many newsgroups
without response.

Thanks for even thinking about it.

David
23rd July 2003