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Hard Drive Woe.

AftyAfty Registered User regular
edited September 2007 in Help / Advice Forum
Hey Guys.

Was happily playing wow yesterday with no problems at all. I shut down the computer as normal.

My girlfriend tried to turn the computer on last night and it appears my hard drive has failed.

the computer tried to boot from CD and then from Network adaptors and then fails and tries again. Ad infinitum.

Now i have no problem with getting a new HD this one was old anyway.

The thing is there are some photos on the HD that weren't backed up (my fault) but my girlfriend is really cut up to lose them. Is there any way to recover the data from the HD?

Im thinking i might try a new drive with windows installed and i might be able to read the other drive, as it still appears in the bios. I wonder if perhaps the boot sector is borked and not the rest. Is this likely to work?

TL;DR

Harddrive dead - can i recover files ?

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Afty on

Posts

  • stigweardstigweard Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Does the hdd show up in the bios? Can you hear it spin up? If it does, it could be something as simple as a corrupted mbr. Boot form the xp recovery cd and use mbrfix. Before you write to the drive though, you should know that any writing you do could cause data loss. Your best bet is to use the drive in another machine and get some data recovery software to use to recover what you can. If it isn't showing up in the bios, it could still be something simple like a loose cable or bad power from psu.

    stigweard on
  • AftyAfty Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Hey thanks for the advice.

    It does show up in the bios and im not sure on the spinning front (am currently at work) while i dont have an xp recovery disk i do have an unbuntu disk that will run directly, so i will use that to see if i can grab my data or at least access it.

    I'm reluctant to write anything currently as the primary concern for me is to keep those photos.

    Have checked all the cables inside and everything seems plugged in correct

    Afty on
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  • kevbotkevbot Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    If you start up from a Ubuntu or Knoppix live CD the drive should be mounted as read-only (assuming that it's NTFS). I've used Knoppix several times in the past to recover data from previously unreadable drives...

    kevbot on
    Your music is bad, and you should feel bad!
  • enderwiggin13enderwiggin13 Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    In my experience, as long as you don't hear metal on metal you should be able to recover at least partial data from it with a Knoppix disc. If you've got some sort of RAID striping going on it will be much more difficult, but a regular drive should still retain some data.

    enderwiggin13 on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • AftyAfty Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Oddity - Computer booted this morning with no problems :/

    Files Backed Up Safely, Thanks for all the advice guys.

    Lock Please :)

    Afty on
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Penny Arcade Forums› Help / Advice Forum