crashed hard disk question.

[Ken_CT]

My hard drive crashed and the system won't load the OS(XP). The drive (Maxtor 130 gig) is partitioned into 4 logical drives. C, the boot drive, can't be read, but E can still be read using norton system work 2005, or by booting off of another hard drive. I didn't lose much mostly backed up except for a few dozen pics of the brand new Kubota /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif.
My question is, I run NSW 2005, booting from an emergency boot disk, run disk doctor, and it says the boot sector needs to be repaired. I say do it, make the undo disk, and it starts to diagnose the drive. NSW said it might take a long time to repair, but is it hanging on "analyzing boot record" or does it take forever to do? I started yesterday in the afternoon and this morning it was still going. the drive is running -light on, but no movement on the completion bar. I hate to lose those pictures, any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

[Jimbrown]

Too many unknowns. Did you try a system restore? If not run restore from the accessories system tools menue, and try to restore from several days before the problem. Don't give up your data is still there. You just got to get it to load. It is a trial and error effort. As last resort reload Xp do not reformat
I repeat do not re format that will kill your data.

 

[Ken_CT]

XP will not start from the boot drive so I can't run restore. I have started XP by putting in an extra drive I had and installing the OS on that drive, using the crashed drive as D,E,F,&G. I can only read E, which unfortunately is the one drive I don't care if it gets lost- just games. I tried running disk doctor from a DOS boot-up, but it won't read the other drives either. Kinda think I'm screwed but, since I have a laptop, and I can run the crashed computer by using the extra drive,I will keep tinkering with the hope of recovering those Kubota pictures!

 

[Soundguy]

Since you can read other volumes on that drive.. heads are good. However.. it hanging on the repair of that volume tells me that there is a significant ( unrecoverable) error in an area of the drive that can't be mapped out into an engineering track.. perhaps in the bootstrap section.

Pretty much this drive is usless as a boot volume.. you may however be able to use partition magic on it and shrink that damaged partition down to minimal size, so you can add more space to another volume. ( I think the data is all but gone if that volume cannot be anylized by NDD.

good luck

Soundguy

 

[MossRoad]

I'd put a different hard drive in the computer and load XP on it.

Then load your NSW on the new drive.

Then put the orginal hard drive in the computer as a secondary drive.

Then copy any files that you can from the old partitions on the origianl drive to the new hard drive.

Then try to run your recovery tools from the new drive and see what you can save from the bad partition on the old drive.

Hope this helps.

 

[MossRoad]

Oh, yeah... once you recover your data, if the drive had bad sectors, toss it out. It will just get worse later. Take the magnets out of it and make yourself a Chalkley cup. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

 

[Ken_CT]

Tried that. In fact the computer is now running on the other drive I loaded XP onto. Tried disk doctor from DOS and couldn't read the bad drive, the tried reading the physical drive and got unreadable info. I guess I lost all of the Kubota baby pictures, should have backed them up. Oh well, live & learn. Thanks to everyone for the help.

 

[PBMAX]

Sounds like you may have gotten all you are gonna get off of it. IF you haven't done so already,I'd check and see if it's still in warranty and see about a new one. I've had some that had 5yr warranties in the past. Though 3yrs seems more common now a days. just a a thought...