HD prob.

[rAjOaNa]

Was wondering can anyone help me on this.

I have been usign my HD as a pri master with a single 'A' partition.

My OS n everything else was running fine. Until one day my PC jus shut off while in windows.

 

After tht when i reboot it halfway through the loading of windows screen, aft a few mins, A blue screen will pop up and shut off in a split sec.

 

Upon some trail n errors, i discovered tht HD partition is now not recognised as FAT32 or NTFS, can't really recall but i think it was NTFS.

 

So now when i boot up using another spare HD as the main one n this one as a slave, i can't open it to see its content and i m promted to format it which means i wld lose all my data in it.

 

So is there a way i cld retrieve my stuff out of this HD or clone this to a fresh HD?

[redbeacon]

I see that you've taken painstaking time to hook up your problematic Hard Drive to try to access it. Good troubleshooting step there.

 

And yes, do *not* even tempt yourself to format it, if you really want to keep the data in it.

 

Bro, while I can't talk to your Hard Drive to ask if it needs to go the hospital, what I can do is suggest you to get data recovery software.

 

Check this out:

http://www.computing.net/answers/hardware/hard-disk-having-raw-file-system/20956.html

 

I agree with the suggestions given by the members there.

In technical lingo, what those software does is to 'guess' what filesystem your hard drive was originally set-up as, and if successful, lets you rescue out the files to another hard drive.

 

So is there a way i cld retrieve my stuff out of this HD or clone this to a fresh HD?

 

Retrieve your stuff, yes there is chance. See abovementioned suggestion.

Clone it to a fresh HD, don't think so...even if you're successful, you're duplicating the problem over to the new HDD and the results would be the same.

 

Hope this helps

[CoolieND]

Just to make sure, have you run any SMART diagnostics on your drive yet?

 

For Seagate (and Maxtor), there's SeaTools. (Use DOS vers., most recent Win vers. has issues)

For Western Digital, there's Lifeguard Tools. (find your product, then get whichever version it lists as compatible)

 

If you have another brand, go to their website, and look for their diagnostic tool. Once you've done that, follow the instructions to run the SMART tests. If it doesn't pass any of the tests, you've got a drive that's on it's way to failing, and I'd pull it immediately (trying to access it can make it worse), and find a company to try and retrieve your data.

 

More likely it's not a physical problem and a logical problem like red was describing, but might as well be careful...

 

Hope you can figure it out!

Edited May 4, 2009 by CoolieND

[rAjOaNa]

Thanks Guys for sharing. Really appreciate it.

 

Bro redbeakon, I tried those data retrieving s/w. But not freeware and they are not cheap. From the trial ver i tried i m sure they wld work. In the 'trial' ver i cld see data on my HDD. But to retrive it i wld have to pay.

 

CoolieND yea i completely forgot to try those out. I guess lifeguard saved the day. I tried some of the func. like disk to disk copy cld work as the drive file sys was 'unknown' how ever managed to do some kind of through scan which prompted to repair some damaged sec. So i did. And aft tht i burn the life guard DOS bootable ver. wanted to try tht. Was not able to boot but guess my faulty HDD revived.

its working normally for a day now. But only thing is tht read n write seems to be to very slow to the disk. The disk to disk now works too. So its abt time to get a new HDD n clone it b4 its too late.

[Naked1]

Use Acronis software to do cloning. It will clone everything including OS together from old to new hdd.