Honey, I shrink my Hard-Disk

[AceSpy]

Hello,

The problems started with me carrying my hard-disk.

When Back, I connected my hard-disk,

1. It reached upto the Operating System choice menu and then on choosing Xp it gave a file missing error and stops.

2. Connected to my friend PC and tried installing, Setup show the partitions, tried installing on C Drive and during formatting it hanged

3. Connected to my friend PC, XP refuses to start, automatic get restarted during login.

4. Connected to another friend PC, starts in 98. Disk recognised. Run Scandisk over one partion. Scandisk tells it corrected so and so errors and then after that the hard disk is no longer recognised.

5. Not even showing in BIOS now.

Please, help, I only want my data back. Any Software or Service that you will recommend. My backups are old, and I will suffer a lot if i cant get it working.

Thanks,
Zeeshan

[nihil]

You might try this:

http://www.roadkil.net/unstopcp.html

You will need a working machine with enough disk space on it for your HDD files.

What partitions do you have and what format are they (FAT16/32/NTFS)?

If the BIOS does not recognise it, try going into setup and run autodetect hard drives.

Run it on the XP machine as a SLAVE and see what you can recover.

Is this an external drive?..............is it a USB connection?

Plese let me know what the results are

[AceSpy]

Hi Nihil,

I have a working machine and lot of free spaces.

I have 5 partitions all FAT32 no NTFS.

I did that, will do again.

No, it is the normal, Samsund hard disk 5200rpm 80 GB

Thanks,
Zeeshan

p.s. shud i send my hdd to dataleach or datarecoverygroup.com or so??

[vanman]

As far as putting it on your friends machine upon starting it xp will 1st off not recognise the configuration because it is looking for your machines settings and therefore will bring up the dreadfull blue screen or some missing files etc..I would put it back in your machine..boot with xp cd and try to repair the partition firstly because that would keep most of your original settings..Remember not the first option:namely recovery console..Upon asking if you want to install xp enter yes..then at the next screen you will see the partitions and another option for repairing the partition..that should work..

Nihils advice is sound for the auto detection and configuration for the friends machine, but I would try to repair the partition first..Otherwise you might have to format and do a clean install..Plug the hdd in your frieds machine as a slave or cable select and copy the files you want over..then format it

hope it helps

[nihil]

Hi,

Is the drive detected when you install it as a slave on your working machine?

Please check the connections and that the jumper is still there (if it has one)

Try connecting it as the master drive and see if it powers up...........any lights/noise? also what error message do you get with it as the only drive, and in the master slot.........screen and/or BIOS beeps.

It sounds as if it might have just died, and if you cannot get a BIOS to recognise it, there is not much you can do.

Please be warned, data recovery agencies can be very expensive so if you have to resort to that, make sure that you agree a price FIRST.

[AceSpy]

Hi,

The good news is that i finally make recovered my data. When connected to my PC again as slave (with no jumper), the disk was visible. I manage to copy all important datas. Some files on copied gave Data Cyclic Error but most where recovered.

thanks for all help,

Zeeshan Alam

p.s. The data recovery group service quoted me 1300$-2000$. huh!!

[AceSpy]

Hey there,

What shud I do with this disk? Is it reliable now?

Thnx,
Zeeshan

[nihil]

Hi Zeeshan

I am glad to hear that you managed to recover most of your data

Firstly I would recommend that you do not move internal hard drives around if they are installed and configured for a Windows XP machine, unless they are set up as proper removable drives.

This is because the copyright protection mechanism of XP is very hardware orientated. My advice in these situations is to get an external USB drive. Windows will detect that as an "external mass storage device" and will be quite happy with it (just like a thumb drive, or the flash card from a digital camera).

My suspicion is that by installing it on another machine you corrupted something or changed the hardware configuration such that it was not recognised when you returned it to its original PC.

I do not think that loading it onto your friend's Windows 98 machine and running scandisk was a good idea. I believe that the way that works is different from Windows XP's "chkdsk". If I were forced to do such a thing, I would only do it on a Windows 2000 box, as that is similar to Windows XP.

As for whether your drive is any good, I would reformat it, attach it as slave again and run the Windows XP "chkdsk" utility with a full surface scan. This will show you if there are any problems with the drive itself. Make sure that you set it to produce a log.

My feelings are that this is a corruption issue rather than a hardware falure one, but you ought to check first.