Previously working Hard Drive now won't read and says it needs formatting

[Chris Silcock]

Hi everyone,

Firstly, I know very little about PC's, so please treat me like an idiot, it will be more helpful that way

Yesterday my PC turned off and rebooted itself.

But it wouldn't reboot.

It kept saying it couldn't find something on IDE-0 and wouldn't boot.

I managed to change the BIOS to look for a CD and re-installed windows XP.

Now, because I am so computer illiterate I have 2 hard drives on my PC, labelled C: and F: along with 2 CD/DVD drives, labelled D: and E:

They all work fine, except F: my second hard drive.

I've had this drive working since new, for about the last 8 months and it contains all our family photo's, music, games, documents etc etc, basically stuff I wanted to keep safe incase of having to re-install windows. (I've done this before a couple of times and F: has always been fine afterwards)

But now, the PC reads the F: drive as being there, but when I click it, it says it needs formatting and I will lose everything on there

When I bring up the properties for the drive it says it is full (pie chart is all blue) but it only had about 65% of 120MB on it before it went wrong.

Device manager etc all say the drive is working properly, i've tried physically taking it out of the case and re-installing it, renaming the drive label (with help from this forum!) and nothing works.

I use Windows XP with Service Pack 1.

Am I b*ggered? Do I have to take it to a specialist shop and get them to retrieve all the data or is there something I can do to rectify it?

Big thanks in advance to anyone who can help
ATB
Chris

 

[Chris Silcock]

For those of you with the same problem

Found this website :

http://www.runtime.org/

Which has a programme on it called "Get Data Back For NTFS" and also one for FAT as well.

Really simple to use too (I managed to work it!)

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Yes ive used this program or one like it.It was on a floppy and it will work.So you got it fixed up huh?

 

[Chris Silcock]

Yes thanks Splatoid.

I only had 30GB free on my C: drive and about 60GB of info on the "damaged" F: drive, so I had to recover a few things at a time to the C: drive, then copy them onto a DVD, delete them from the C: drive, the recover more stuff from the dead F: drive etc etc.

Probably an easier way of doing it, but it worked for me!

Just reformatted the F: drive and currently (as I type!) dragging stuff back from the DVDs I used to the F: drive.

I suppose the upshot of it all is, I NOW have all my family photo's, music and documents backed up on DVDs ... which I should've done in the first place!!

Also, something I didn't know, this programme will also list stuff that's been deleted from your hard drive too! I tried to recover an old movie (Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee - hey, I was curious!!) and it recovered it and played it fine ... I deleted that about a year ago!!

I'm now off to find things that my wife and kids have deleted to keep from me

 

[RicoDirenzo]

Congrats! Get Data back is an exceptional recovery program..Not only does it recover your lost files but puts them back in the same folders unless there was significant over writting on those sectors. FYI: I back up all by data to a USB external HD! It only gets turned on rarely and will save data forever, barring WWIII, fire or theft!! Highly recommended you get an exteranl HD/USB drive and then you can save a huge amount of addtional porn....just kidding!