failed WD harddrive; help please

[hawk]

Hi,

My harddrive has failed, and there is a small amount of data that I
would like to be able to recover since my last backup (I'm going for
RAID next time). I'm having some difficulty navigating the possibilities.

The drive is a Western Digital 80GB, 7200RPM (wd800BB), and WD
diagnostics are reporting error 159 ("SMART error; replace drive"). So,
I know I'm replacing the drive, but I can't even access it currently.
When I boot, BIOS says "master disk failed"; when I get to "A:" from the
WD recovery disk, I can't select "C:", and bootmagic and partition magic
rescue disks can't find the drive.

Any suggestions for software that might be able to find the drive? I
guess my other options are buy a new hard disk, install OS, and run
something from there with the broken drive as slave (should be easy, but
what to run from the new drive to find the broken one?), or pay a
professional recovery service. Problem with that is there are tons of
them, and I have no idea who is good, and what I might expect to pay.

Any advice appreciated,
Byard Edwards

 

[skippyonspeed]

If you type "getdataback" in your search engine you should find sites
offering recovery programs for FAT and NTFS.
The good news is that many offer Freeware.

Hope it helps

 

[skippyonspeed]

If you type "getdataback" in your search engine you should find sites
offering recovery programs for FAT and NTFS.
The good news is that many offer Freeware.

Hope it helps

 

[hawk]

If you type "getdataback" in your search engine you should find sites
offering recovery programs for FAT and NTFS.
The good news is that many offer Freeware.

Hope it helps

Thanks a ton. I went to the first site that came up on google
(wwww.runtime.org) and it worked perfectly. I got everything I wanted
back. There were some read errors, but they must have been in stuff
that I didn't try and copy. It cost something like $80, but it was
definitely worth it.

Byard Edwards