Hard Drive failure? Am i gonna cry

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Ok i kinda have given up and i believe my hard drive is gonna need serious data recoery by professionals.

Alright so i had to back up all my data from an older hard drive to this relatively new 320 gig Hitachi drive.
Me being as special as i am i backed up all my crucial pics and stuff i cannot retreive onto this drive WHICH used to be in an LG dvd recordable unit which i opened after that failed. Now i did format the drive and all was working smoothly for at least 3-5 months.I had 2 partitions on it. One small partition was for Xp and the rest full of data.

Now i have placed it into an external IDE power supply and it picks up in Windows and the 'safely remove' icon appears in the taskbar but when i try and access My Computer the machine just freezes.i cannot access Task Manager or anything. I have to do a reboot.Now i opened up Partition Magic and immediately told me one of the drives has a serious issue and data should be backed up and the drive should be reformatted! And when i rebooted Windows last night it picked up errors on the drive and deleted them.I could see it deleting or repairing data that isnt important but hey at least it was still picking it up :confused:

This hard drive also used to be my primary one and i could boot into Xp with it so i placed it back into the desktop and when i booted up it stated Disk Read Error ,press crtl alt dlt to retart! :cry: I did not have this issue a few weeks back.

Can anyone suggest something else before i consider taking this drive for data recovery? Are there any tools that can get around the 'hanging' part and allow you to see and copy the data across. I will go buy a new external if needs be just to save the data.

any help appreciated :(
 
il give it a shot thanks man!
ok i also notice that Chkdsk does an automated scan on the drive before it gets into windows (this is when its plugged into my desktop as slave).
it finds NO bad regions on the disk and it displays the size of the data correct. im hoping the data is fine?
The problem is after the chkdsk is complete it does not resume into Windows.it just locks up and i have to restart again. Safe Mode is also not getting anywhere.

i just know from work experience that when we put a hard drive into a secondary and it hangs we usually send it for data recovery :(
 
Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional should do the job. Just remember to recover to a different drive ;)
 
Any recent Linux Live CD (Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE) should let you selectively backup windows files if they are not damaged, Gparted will enable you to backup the failing partition to another disk.
 
GParted seems amazing so far.it clearly sees my data partition and it even notes that my boot partition on that drive has some major issue!

ok so im gonna do the copy to my external.my question is ...will it overwrite my externals partition?
Mick . i would love to get the livecd that allows the files to copied over manually instead of the partition. i dont wanna do something silly and wipe over my data on the external!
anyways it looks like there is hope :D thanks so far
 
You will find Ubuntu here http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.04/

Download and burn the PC (Intel x86) desktop CD iso

When you boot select "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer"

When booted ignore the Install icon and select "Places" "Computer" from the top toolbar and you can start exploring. Flash & external drives will be recognised when plugged in - warning, before removing these devices you should unmount them first, right click the device in the R/H window pane for this option.

Hope you come right.
 
MickZA said:
You will find Ubuntu here http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.04/

Download and burn the PC (Intel x86) desktop CD iso

When you boot select "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer"

When booted ignore the Install icon and select "Places" "Computer" from the top toolbar and you can start exploring. Flash & external drives will be recognised when plugged in - warning, before removing these devices you should unmount them first, right click the device in the R/H window pane for this option.

Hope you come right.
Click to expand...

Ok cheers bud...i will have to download that at work .il give this thread a bump if i need more help.or just to say shot!

btw i tried Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional and once i launched it my machine froze due to the hard drive.wierd.
 
MICK

THANKS A MILLION.
That GParted Cd has done the trick. The boot partition was corrupt so i formatted it with Gparted and once i got back into Windows the drive could be read past that formatted partition and i can happily access my data. That cd will be handy for future! Thanks a million bro.... you saved me a box of Kleenex :p
 
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