Carl Harvey

I have a Hard Drive that is failing and I want to save as much as I can from it.

I have run IBM's drive check and it is showing sector errors, unfortunately they all seem to be on the boot sector.

Anyone know a way of being able to retrieve the information on the drive?

MrDeference

I would say, don't power it up again until you have a solution ready.
What OS are you using? Is it NTFS or FAT? Do you have access to another computer and feel happy about poking around inside the machines?

Carl Harvey

It is Fat

I have already installed a new HDD in the machine.

Now I need to try to retrieve some of the data.

Carl Harvey

BTT

MarkO

You should be able to mount the drive without a valid boot sector. Can the machine see the drive at all?

There is a command called 'recover' in XP (and W2K, I think) which is designed to recover data from disks with bad sectors.

If the data is *really* important, and none of your tools can access it, you could always send the drive to a 3rd-party data recovery company who should be able to work wonders with it, and archive whatever they recover back onto CD.

Surely, though, if the data was something important, you can just restore it from your most recent backup?

super_si

YOu not tried adding it as slave or master on ide channel 1?

Carl Harvey

I have added it as a slave and can see it.

When I try to copy files it gets so far and then hangs.

It is in a machine running win 98, Is it worth trying putting it in a machine with XP Pro and running the repair tools? Anyone had any experience of this?

Of course I have a backup x%"$£!