Unreadable hard drive

[Doug]

Hello
Recently I was experiencing trouble with a computer that
I had built myself. I was running Win XP Pro with a
Western Digital 80gb 8mb cache HD as my master, and a WD
80gb 2mb cache HD as my slave. The 8mb was my workhorse
hd, while the 2mb was my backup hd containing a lot of
important personal information from the last few years.
Both drives were formatted with NTFS.

The problem arose when my Athlon CPU stopped wanting to
run at its proper FSB speed. I began experimenting with
FSB speeds to see how close I could get the chip back to
it's proper speed (266 MHz). This involved many
rebootings and failed startups.

I moved the 2mb WD HD, jumper setting set for cable
select, to another computer running Win 2000. I had done
this HD swap many times and did not think anything of
it. When I installed it in the Win 2000 machine and
rebooted, I was unable to access the contents. The
message 'F:\ is not accessable. The file or directory is
corrupted and unreadable.' Feeling worried, I
disconnected the drive and placed it into an ESD bag to
try again at a later date.

After sorting out my processor problems, I re-installed
the 2mb HD into my Win XP system. I was greeted with the
same message on attempting to access the drive's
contents: 'F:\ is not accessable. The file or directory
is corrupted and unreadable.'

I am not sure what to do. It is vital that I be able to
salvage this information. I own a registered copy of
Partition Magic 8.0, so I am not constrained with only
using Win XP utilities. Any help that anyone could offer
would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

[D.Currie]

If it's vital, you might want to take it to a company that does data
recovery.

Otherwise, you might find some data recovery software online that might be
able to get the data back. There are quite a few; some free, some quite
costly. But the more you do to the drive, the more chance you're going to
make it worse.

 

[Hans Werner]

Hello
Recently I was experiencing trouble with a computer that
I had built myself. I was running Win XP Pro with a
Western Digital 80gb 8mb cache HD as my master, and a WD
80gb 2mb cache HD as my slave. The 8mb was my workhorse
hd, while the 2mb was my backup hd containing a lot of
important personal information from the last few years.
Both drives were formatted with NTFS.

The problem arose when my Athlon CPU stopped wanting to
run at its proper FSB speed. I began experimenting with
FSB speeds to see how close I could get the chip back to
it's proper speed (266 MHz). This involved many
rebootings and failed startups.

I moved the 2mb WD HD, jumper setting set for cable
select, to another computer running Win 2000. I had done
this HD swap many times and did not think anything of
it. When I installed it in the Win 2000 machine and
rebooted, I was unable to access the contents. The
message 'F:\ is not accessable. The file or directory is
corrupted and unreadable.' Feeling worried, I
disconnected the drive and placed it into an ESD bag to
try again at a later date.

After sorting out my processor problems, I re-installed
the 2mb HD into my Win XP system. I was greeted with the
same message on attempting to access the drive's
contents: 'F:\ is not accessable. The file or directory
is corrupted and unreadable.'

I am not sure what to do. It is vital that I be able to
salvage this information. I own a registered copy of
Partition Magic 8.0, so I am not constrained with only
using Win XP utilities. Any help that anyone could offer
would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Have you tried to access the data with another operating system? If you
have a broadband connection you can download knoppix (www.knopper.net),
a linux based system (with GUI) running totally from CD-ROM. A very nice
tool for data recovery

good luck
Hans