HDD Failure?

[leonec]

I came home last night and my computer said "disk boot failure". So I tried to go through the XP recovery Consol but when it tried to preform the fast recover, it said it couldn't find a hard drive.
So I rebooted the system and tried to boot up normally, and the HDD was making an awful noise, like a clanging noise when tring to boot, and sometimes it would get up to the XP splash screen and then go to a screen that says XP can't boot and to pick a different boot option (safe mode, LKG...).
So I am going to go and get another HDD today, but what should I do to recover the data on this HDD? And also, what the hell happend to cause this?

 

[ski]

A HD can fail at any time, even right out of the box.
It sounds like either the bearings or a read/write head went bad on yours.

 

[ski]

A data recovery service may be able to recover files from it($$$$$).
And you may want to consider backing up critical files after you install the new HD.

 

[MeTurk]

that kind of recovery cost about 500euro it cost at least 50 just for them to look at it

 

[Jontmke]

A trick you can use to get files off of this drive, and I am not kidding here, is to put it in an air tight plastic bag and freeze it!
You then can get about 5 or 10 minutes out of it. Then do it again. This is only for getting critical files, like documents.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[leonec]

So I installed the new HDD and put XP on it, then I put the corrupt HDD on the secondary. Now when I POST it stops and says that one hard drive has failed and corupt and to press F1 to continue, so I do and it take a really long time at a black screen then it starts a chkdsk which started last night and I finally just shut it down after a few hours, will it ever boot to my new install of XP on my new HDD? I want to see if I can use File Scavenger 2.0 to recover my files. and it chkdsk it says over and over again "###### is unreadable". How long should this take?

 

[ski]

Disconnect the failed HD, and see if the system boots up with just the new HD connected.
If it does, then you may have to see if a recovery service co. can save important files from the bad HD.

 

[Jontmke]

You will probably have to let chkdsk finish. It will take hours and hours. I usually start it up and go to bed.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[leonec]

So what I ended up doing is booting up with only my new HDD installed then when it was up I plugged in the old corrupt HDD and XP picked it up and installed it without restarting, so I went into explorer and 2 of my 3 partitions showed up, so I started to copy data to the new HDD partition and I got cycle redundency errors so I tried copying from a cmd window and it work fine, my computer was reeeeaaallllyyy slow with the corrupt HDD attached but I just let it go for a few hours and everything copied over! However the one partition that didn't show up, that was where my important data was, any idea on how to get this back? Should I try File Scavenger 2.0?

Also, when I copied all my music over using xcopy it did it fine but, the entire music folder is hidden and is still hidden when I turn on hidden folders, I can access the folder and subfolders but I initialy need to type the path in the address bar to get there, and when I right click on the root folder and go to properties to uncheck the hidden box, the option is greyed out so I can't make any changes. Does anyone know how to change this attribut another way?

Sorry about the long post. Thanks.

 

[Jontmke]

You can change attributes the old fashioned way, from a command line. I am not sure how it works with folders, probably the same. Here is the commands:
attrib filename -h -r -s -a

Here is the help for the command:
Displays or changes file attributes.

ATTRIB [+R | -R] [+A | -A] [+S | -S] [+H | -H] [[drive:][path]filename] [/S]

+ Sets an attribute.
- Clears an attribute.
R Read-only file attribute.
A Archive file attribute.
S System file attribute.
H Hidden file attribute.
/S Processes files in all directories in the specified path.

Should work.


Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[leonec]

Thanks but I just tried that and it didn't work. I'm not sure what to try next.