hard disc no longer boots - self inflicted injury

Justboy

So i recently picked up a 500gb external hdd in order to back all my shit up.

Of course whilst going through disc management and formating the thing i noticed my internal hdd (200gb) had 60gb unallocated.

So i attempted to format the 60gb to free it up...at this point i was greedy for space (and yes i know its stupid that i didn't backup my stuff beforehand....i believe its the alanis morissette defintion of ironic) iIt reached 100% and then said something along the lines of 'formating unsuccesful'

All was ok until i restarted the pc....it wouldn't boot, i could access BIOS but any further and i simply got a blank screen with a flashing _

So i've attempted various things with no success, and i have a SATA to USB converter kit and have plugged it into a working PC. One inserted the disc only comes up in Computer Management and is completely unallocated....i am now stuck.

I'm tentative to mess around with it any further as i don't want to wipe the disc or anything, and have picked up another internal hdd to start afresh with....question is will i ever be able to crack open the nuggets from this messed up one (not really too keen on taking it to a store...fair bit of 'sensitive' material) and if so how should i go about it?

Cheers

Jim B

Everywhereasign

That sucks ass. Unsuccessful or incomplete partial formating can fuck up the master boot sector. This not only tells the BIOS where to look for the operating system, but it tells the computer where each sector of the HD begins and ends.

You could try installing your OS on the new (blank) HD, and then install the broken one as a slave. Most likely you'll get the same unallocated space, but it's worth a try. I'd also suggest trying out a burnable/bootable Ubuntu flavour. If the Boot Sector is fucked it won't help any, but it's always worth giving another OS a shot at the drive.

All that being said an done, if the information on it is really really important you can send it to the men in the white suits and clean room. They can get the data off there, no problem at all. It'll just cost you quite a sum of money.

If it makes you feel any better, most of us have been through the same thing.

Gabe and Tycho included

Eat_Fire

Find a friend who has a mac and hookup the hard drive with a "USB hard drive enclosure" and see what happens. OSX tends to be able to read corrupted hard drives sometimes. Why does it? I have no idea.

Justboy

cheers for the advice guys..guess i'll have to spend the rest of the month rebuilding my collection of goodies....

Gdiguy

if the master boot record is the problem, if you have your windows cd handy, there's a way to fix that... it's something like "fixmbr /hard drive location" (fake edit: yeah, see http://pcsupport.about.com/od/termsf/p/fixmbr.htm or just google it) from the recovery console... of course if it messed up the other partitions it's possible (likely) that this won't actually fix the problem, but.. *shrug