Seagate 300 gig IDE drive seen as unformatted

[Franc Zabkar]

I have a Seagate 300 gig IDE drive (not SATA) that I have been using
as a data drive. Windows XP Home SP3 now says that the drive is
unformatted. When I run the Seagate DiscWizard program it says that
sector 92 is unreadable.

I have a lot of data on the drive that I have not backed up. I
suspect that most of the data is still there but just not accessible
through Windows. Is there a good freeware or shareware program that
I can use to access my data? Thank you in advance for all replies.

I would clone your drive and then work on the clone.

In cases where the drive has bad sectors, you could use multi-pass
cloning software such as ddrescue. It clones the easy sectors on the
first pass, and difficult sectors on subsequent passes.

Before allowing any data recovery software to work on your data, I
would first use Microsoft's Sector Inspector to view the partition
table and boot sector:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat
file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which
you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine
it.

Here are "Top 10 FREE Data Recovery Software":
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/01/24/top-10-free-data-recovery-software/

.... and a few more:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/WD2000JB-00REA0-firmware/m-p/16201#M1008

- Franc Zabkar