Hard drive problem

[qmann]

I am trying to figure out what the problem is with a friends computer. His windows xp is extremely slow to boot up and freezes constantly. He possibly wants to get a new hard drive if this is defective. I even tried to boot up in safe mode and with problems.

I set it up as a slave and put it into my computer to view the contents. I wanted to run a quick virus check and adaware/spyware check while it was in there. It recognized the drive no problem but when i clicked on the drive it asked me to format the drive.

Why is it doing this? Is there anything i can do to fix it, or recover the data?

Quentin

 

[micker377]

What file system is used by both computers? Win 98 (Fat32), can't read XP (NTFS).

 

[micker377]

Also, download the harddrives manufacturers diagnostics, and run them in your friends setup. It sounds more like a malware, memory, or heat problem. What CPU is the computer using? If Intel, the CPU will "throttle down" when it overheats. An AMD will just stop (a few times and die - permanently!). Post back with details on the computer.

 

[qmann]

Both Windows xp ntfs. I check the properties and it shows 0bytes on the drive.. Intel CPU for the hard drive on the original computer, mine is an AMD but am only hooking it up as a slave drive.

It's a samsung drive.. i don't believe it is a heat problem though... could be memory.. i'll check his mother board and throw a stick of mine in if it's compatible to see if it makes a difference.

 

[qmann]

One more thing, i'm running EASYRECOVERY PRO and it has already found partition errors.. and looks like it will take
an extremely long time to try to recover.

Thanks for the advice by the way.

 

[wolluf]

Is goback installed on this drive?

As well as driver diagnostics, run chkdsk /f on drive when its slaved (this would be my first line of attack - especially with ntfs, as it has built in recovery from filestore corruption).

 

[qmann]

goback isn't installed on the device. i tried running recovery system and then i tried chkdsk and it stops at 25% cannot get any further.

Put in the windows xp disk and the main drive C: is not ntfs.. i don't know what to do to recover this.

 

[wolluf]

Have you run drive manufacturer's diagnostic (as Micker suggested) as it does sound like the drive is dying. If data recovery is needed, after checking out status of drive, I'd run a data recovery app against it (ASAP if diagnostic confirms its dying) - eg getdataback.

 

[qmann]

i've tried datarecovery and it seems to start reading it but at about 25% the time keeps going up.. this seems to where the fail is, whether it is a bad sector on the hard drive i don't know. I've tried everything though. I'm going to get a new hard drive.. spent too much time troubleshooting already.

Thanks for all your help guys.

Q