Hard Drive Crashed--Help

[Partyat33]

Can anyone out there recover the data from my hard drive. Its an IBM PC (work). I have a lot of data on it that I don't want to lose and the folks here say they 'don't do that'.



Thanks





Dennis

 

[me4osu]

Mine died on me while I was working in Eastern Europe. When I got back our IT guy said he could send it off to Dell to get it restored, but it costs $800. 00 and they only have a 70 or 80% success rate. If they can't get your data, you still pay.

 

[Morphious]

how did your hard drive crash? will it just not boot? or is there corrupted sectors? Can you put it on as a secondary drive and see it on your computer? I would go that route first and see if the data can be recovered, then look at hard drive recovery houses.



Morph.

 

[Doc Tinker]

Dennis



Tonight or Tomorrow, I'll email you a program that will let you image the drive and then you can use a explorer utility to read and restore the files. I used this on my bosses Windows 2000 Pro drive when I crapped out on him and it worked. So maybe it'll work for you



Doc

 

[willyslover]

See Doc . . all those classes did help ya... . and who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks

 

[Partyat33]

Super Doc,



I was told there are bad sectors. It will not boot.



Thanks



Dennis

 

[Eventer]

I assume you are running Windows. My condolences...



Boot to a DOS prompt (not a DOS box inside Windows) by pressing F8 (I believe that is correct) when you see Starting Windows or something like that then run chkdsk /f to check for bad sectors. Consider buying a disk utility such as Norton Utilities that can fix most problems. It's only $60 or so at your local Wally World.



You might also try fdisk /mbr from the same DOS prompt.

 

[Ladders]

My trick is it usually the electronics. Give mdl etc info and maybe someone has a match that the board could be swapped with. Worth a try before you spend the big $$'s on a pro recovery.



Programs do work and if you could get it up as a slave, could copy over to the new one (make sure new one is same or bigger size). There is also a "GHOST " program but it copies sector by sector from gud one to bad one (which may help at some point).



GOOD God Doc, after fingers, hands, etc you now wanna decapitate drives???











\\BF//

 

[JohnMcIntyre]

Norton utilities gets my vote

Dennis, it's of little consolation but everyone learns this lesson once. :{ It depends on what you do from here on that really counts!!



Seriously though, the best user friendly utility that I have come across is called Norton Utilities by the company called Symantec. This sucker takes over from where the limitations of the PC standard software and utilities become all too apparent.



However like most things in life the only guarantee in life is death and the best advice I can give you is to get into a regular routine of backing up your hard disc. ( The best analogy to pre-bombing is to install them gauges first) It's a major chore the first time but then the backups are of an incremental nature and pretty quick. These days Firewire and USB peripherals take most of the pain out of this process and for a fraction of the cost the data retreival services will charge you and with no guarantees either.



HTH