HDD Recovery, I Need Help Please

[MorphiousV]

Hi, I'm currently working on recovering some files from my 250gb Maxtor HardDrive and was wondering what program is best for a drive with horribly bad sectors. I had a few problems with my big drives in the past with losing information due to the 140gb barrier; but this time i'm not sure how the problem started. One day I was on my computer and it just froze; I restarted and then it said "A Disk Read Error Occurred, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" So it won't boot up. So I put a new hard drive in so that I could read the Maxtor and try to recover files. There is a problem though... In previous situations with my drives not booting up, the files were usually still whole files and I could recover nearly all of them. But this time they are broken files and nearly non of the music files are what they used to be; Almost as if chkdisk got a hold of them and orphaned them. But it never went to chkdisk. So I really need to know what program would be best to repair bad sectors/or something that would hopefully repair my files. Right now I'm using File Scavenger version 2.1; and it finds nearly everything, but when I "recover" them... they are heavily damaged, and not alot of files actually work. Now... I am just using Exhaustive Search; I did try defunct volume search once but I didn't set any advanced options because I don't really know what all that is. If some of you could please help me out I would highly appreciate it. Thanks!

 

[MorphiousV]

Update

I've been searching the internet for people who had this problem: "A Disk Read Error Occured. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart."

It turns out that the solution in some cases had to do with the Bios; for some people reseting the bios to defaults did the trick. But I tried it and it didn't work for me. Now... I don't know what their situations where, but for me... I have a 250GB Maxtor HDD and have 235GB used on the drive. The error message just popped up the other day after my PC froze and I rebooted. I've had previous occations of data loss due to the 140GB Barrier; but this time with my HDD I made sure to update my OS and some other things to make sure that didn't happen again. I have been using it past 140GB safely for some time now, but then this happend. So could this be due to my Bios not being able to read the large 235GB Partition now? I have an Asus P4P800 Motherboard, with a Bios that reads "v2.51 Copyright 1985-2002 American Megatrends Inc." Would updating my Bios help this problem? If anyone knows anything about this situation please help me out. Thanks!

 

[EricB]

Google ontrack easy recovery

 

[cdkiller]

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1139

there is alot of useful data recovery information on that site. You have a first class motherboard. ok maybe i just like Asus too much. updating your bios will help as that has helped me many times. last week i could not get my asus system to boot fedora core 4 because it kept on giving an irq error; i updated the bios and the problem was solved. i have a p4p800SE motherboard. that makes we wonder about another problem and since we have almost similar boards perhaps you might be able to help. i using XP pro with SP2 and outlook 2003 professional insists on hanging on a regular basis. now even if i do a clean format and reinstall xp and office the problem persists. can anybody help?

 

[RicoDirenzo]

This is an awesome data recovery program and it is cheap and downloadable: http://www.runtime.org/

 

[Osiris]

ERD Commander 2005

 

[MorphiousV]

CDkiller, thanks I'll try updating the bios. Do you know if there is a way to update bios without using a floppy disk... I don't even have a floopy drive ;D haha. Thanks

 

[RicoDirenzo]

Buy a floppy. Now you know why it is needed. $15 to $25!!!!!

 

[htcs]

GetDataBack NTFS works great at the office! Takes a heck of a long time, but it works.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Steve Gibsons SpinRite is a great program but it costs $80 + dollars.