1 Year Old Harddrive, bad block, any chance of recovery?

[Nerdhurd]

Greetings all, my neighbors computer has a second hard drive that is pretty new (less then a year) with all sorts of images and important things saved on it. Ofcourse she never went to the trouble to back it up or anything. Anyway the disk is no longer assesable and event viewer gives a disk error that says BAD BLOCK. Is there any utility you guys recommend I could try running? Should i try the "put it in a freezer" trick? I just wanna get the data off if possible

thanks

 

[micker377]

No longer accessible" in what way? Does the BIOS see it? Does it show in Device Manager? Have you downloaded and run the manufacturer's diagnostics program? Can you run chkdsk? More info needed.

 

[paparazi]

Nerdhurd
Try and see if it will be accessable connected as a slave in another system.
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[stduc]

Get SprinRite (

http://www.grc.com)

and see what it has to say about the disk. You could try getting the manufacturers utility, but personally I don't trust them not to trash my data. I trust SprinRite - worth the money!

 

[CobolKid]

Ditto on the SpinRite, it's saved the day a few times here.

In my "book;" you won't find a better recovery and maintenance utility for hard drives, AND it’s quite inexpensive too! Run the original equipment manufacturer’s "repair" utility, or scandisk (& allow it to fix), or many other utilities, and you’ll get a myriad of generically renamed files and directories that are essentially worthless, as well as lots of un-recovered stuff. Run SpinRite and you’ll get most all back properly named and located, usually the "bad" sectors are reliably repaired too.

For a situation like yours, I highly recommend that you run SpinRite at it’s level 5 setting. This will require many hours of machine time to complete, it’s well worth the time! In addition to recovery, Level 5 will perform a “refresh” of the drive’s media, which should eliminate further data degradation if the hard drive has developed a physical defect.

Steve