Hard Drive Issues

[Better Off]

I have a hard drive I believe is toast, but it unfortunatly has some critical information. A user had a 200 gig hard drive he was using to store code on. One day he said he booted up and it wasn't being detected by windows. I've tried everything I could think of so far which includes.

1. Installing the hard drive in another system to try and retrieve the data, it doesn't come up, and in the computer mangement under admin panel it doesn't list the drive at all.

2. Next just to see if the drive was working, I started an install of XP, got to the part where it asks which drive to install to etc, it lists the drive with the proper space....

194475 MB DISK 0 AT ID 1 ON BUS 0 ON ATAPI

(Setup Cannot Acces This Disk)

3. I tried booting into dos to use utilities such as fdisk, diskpart, scandisk etc, nothing pick it up.

The bios picks up the drive no problem, I can also use Seagates Disk Utility to actually scan the disk, and it passes the 90 second test, so it's able to read and write data. I usually would have given up and chucked the thing, but the user says the data is very critical, anyone have any ideas at all?

 

[FlashDude]

It sounds like it is now a question of how much he wants to spend to retrieve the data. It is a very costly process and can be in the thousand's of dollars. There is one more thing you could do. There are some people that change the board on the hdd and then it works fine. Yours sounds like a board problem not a problem with the disk surface. You have to buy the exact same model number hdd and pray the firmware/hardware is still the same. Let me see if I can find the article I was thinking about.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Try to put it in a Zipplock bag to keep out the moisture and freeze it for about an hour or two.Then hurry and slap it in and try to transfer the fles. Ive had this work once for me. Also try Superwin PE or Knoppix to retrive the files from this drive.

 

[OatesyX]

i had a similar problem but managed to get back my data so may be able to help you, send me a private and ill give you the details, itll take a while to do ,