Hoagie said:
Hi,
My 80 gig D: drive may have given up its ghost.
Event ID: 7 Description: The device, \Device\HDD1, has a
bad block. ...
My BIOS sees it as @!#!$@! but Windows and DOS fdisk
cannot.
Any tips on utilities I can use to extract the data?
Thanks a bunch ... I have 10 years of work I need
desperately back.
Restore data from backups. If no backups are available, then there are a
few things to do. If the drive can be seen (and I'm not sure what you
actually mean by "BIOS sees it as @!#!$@!") then there are various data
recovery programs you can download and try. Google for "data recovery
software". I use a paid one called Easy Recovery Pro from Ontrack which
works quite well. Of course, you will be doing the downloading and
creating a bootable floppy on a different computer. Or, depending on
what computers you own and their setups, you could boot with a Knoppix
cd. If Knoppix can see the data, it can copy it to a good drive, but
only to FAT32 since NTFS writing isn't supported in Linux. Or you can
remove the drive and slave it in another XP machine and copy data over
that way. If the drive cannot be seen at all by the data recovery
software or other machines, then call Drive Savers
(
www.drivesavers.com), an excellent professional data recovery firm
highly regarded in the tech industry. Their services are not
inexpensive, and only you can decide whether your data is worth the
cost.
Malke
