WD1200 Drive Failure

[AND_YOU_ARE]

I helped a friend of mine install a new western digital 120gb hard drive. This was on tuesday night. The instal was successful, drive letter assigned, formatted and all that. He transfered his data over from his main drive. It was one folder that contained 75gb of data. Then wednesday night the new drive began to do the heavy clicking when he was just on ie and aim. Windows cant recognize the drive. It cant boot up with the drive installed. I placed it in a usb enclosure, it clicks it can be seen in device manager, but not windows explorer.

It seems like the drive is toast. Is there any way to recover the data?

Thanks for any help.

 

[uzi9mm]

You mean to tell me in 2 days a Western Digital HD shit the bed?????? WTF. OK can you access the drives and its contents from DOS? If you can what I would do is copy all of the files to a secondary HD. But if it is not accesible from DOS then I would ask myself how much is the data worth on the drive???? If it is worth more than having it taken to a Data Recovery/extraction bussiness, then I suggest you do just that. But it is very expensive, most places dont have a "list" they make you call a rep. for an estimate.

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

How would I go about accessing the data in dos. Would this be done in window's comand prompt or out side of windows.

 

[uzi9mm]

You need a boot disk that will boot you to DOS either from a CD or a floppy. You can try to use the command prompt through the windows shell but I highly doubt that it will work. To make a boot disk go to this page to download a DOS boot disk maker,

http://www.putergeek.com/downloads/popup_dos.htm

Good Luck!!!!!!!

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

What commands would I use to save a file to a different hard drive?

 

[uzi9mm]

The Western Digital should be C: and the "other" drive should be D: with your any optical drives being e: and or f:

I really dont know what type of files and or folders you want to copy so I cant give you a example of the command but what you need to know is at this site.

http://www.easydos.com/copy.html

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Thanks for the help. I'll see what I can do.

 

[moosluvr2]

recovery

Get Data Back is the best recovery software I have tried. It will recover the data even if the disk has been formatted. Just hook the problem disk up as secondary, and run the program from the primary.

If you want to do it from a DOS boot disk, with the problem disk as secondary, go to d: then type xcopy *.* c:/s<enter> That will copy all files, and folders to c drive. If you don't use the s switch it won't copy anything in folders.