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From: Michael W. Ryder on 31 Mar 2008 14:42
Matt wrote:
> Hey guys. I've got a real problem on my hands. Basically all my work
> for the last 4 years at University, along with countless amounts of
> data I've accumulated over the years stored on my hard drive might be
> lost. The drive suddenly stopped working properly 2 nights ago, and
> I've spent the weekend since trying ot recover what data I can.
>
> The first thing I should address is the issue of backups. Any
> meaningful backup has simply not been possible due to the high volume
> of data, and the very finite budget I live on as a student
> constraining me to only having one hard drive. A conveneient place to
> store around 9GB of data just doesn't exist for me. I guess hindsight
> is a wonderful thing, but at the moment I'm stuck without my data.
>
> Anyway, recovery of my work is of course a top priority, so I could do
> with some advice on how I should proceed from here? Firstly, I'll
> explain the situation in more detail:
>
> Causes for Concern:
> ------------------------------
>
> - I get a "Disk Read Error" whenever I try to boot up the hard drive
> as a Master.
>
> - When I boot it up as a Slave, I can boot into XP from the other hard
> drive, but it takes a very long time to boot up and load XP. Once in
> XP, I cannot read the contents of the drive (which I can verify as
> I've just given it one last try) and I get a message telling me to
> format the drive.
>
> Causes for Optimism:
> --------------------------------
>
> - On occassion the drive has been more co-operative and I have been
> able to copy over a small fraction of my work with the drive as a
> slave either in XP or in DOS. However, very quickly the operating
> system comes up against a file it cannot read, and eventually gives up
> the copying.
>
> - The drive is always detected by the BIOS
>
> - There are no clicking noises or other strange noises coming from the
> hard drive, which suggests to me the fault may not be mechanical.
>
> Going Forward
> ----------------------
>
> A friend of mine who has more experience with PC repair ran a program
> called Restorer2000, but the drive contents couldn't be read by
> Windows, so the program didn't have much success either. However, it
> was able to read a few files from my Windows partition, but my work
> partition was completly unavailable. A number of read errors were
> quoted in locations. These locations were given as a string of
> numbers, either about 7-8 digits long, and 11 digits long. The exact
> values I can't recall.
>
> My next step has been to look for some companies that specialise in
> data recovery and see if they will have more luck by perhaps taking
> the drive apart and extracting data from the platters themseleves.
>
> Anyway, the main point of this post is to gain some a better idea of
> what has happened to my hard drive, based upon the above symptoms.
> From there I can see if paying ~�500 to recover a 40GB partition is
> likely to be successful.
>
> The drive is a Western Digital WD800JB 80GB ATA hard drive.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Matthew Boulton


The last time I had a similar problem I used Spinrite, which uses a DOS
boot diskette, to repair the damage to the drive enough to use Ghost to
copy all the information to a new drive. Much cheaper than using a
recovery firm.
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