Think my hard drive died

[Myria]

Hi all,

Last night I got a disk write error message (could not write the antivirus log) and my antivirus started eating up all my CPU time. I restarted my computer and then could not load windows at all (windows xp home). The windows screen comes up, then a blue screen quickly flashes and reboots the computer and I get the "start from safe mode, last known good configuration, etc" screen.

I ran the recovery console from the windows cd and when I tried to get the directory of C:, it just gave me an error. Running a partition program shows no partition found.

I'm at a loss for what step I should make next to try and recover my drive.

Any advice is appreciated.

[Lucavi]

Ive been there, done that. I was in a similar situation, where the computer slowy crawled to a stop, then froze. Restarting the computer showed that windows wouldn't freeze, the blue screen of death hit, and that was that.

Partitions failed to recognize, and booting the hard drive as a slave to another system failed as well.

I would try to have a friend take your hard drive and boot it as a slave to their own -- some times, if it is simply an internal failure, you can access the data as a slave, transfer it to a good HD, then simply discard the card.

If that doesn't work, then you probably have a mechanical failure. This can be exceedingly expensive - I was looking at $850 to have them swap parts and restore my HD. I decided to save the HD for access later (when I have more money) and to cut my losses and start over.

Best of luck to you.

[nitsuj]

On the bright side, it's a good opportunity to get a solid state drive :D

[Norellicus]

You're going to think this sounds crazy (it does), but it works. You can do this about 3-4 times before the drive completely fails, and it'll buy you a little time to get your data back.

Put the drive in the freezer. Leave it for a few hours, then slave it to another pc and quickly start copying as much data as you can (hot swap bays or usb drive connectors really help here). After probably 20 minutes you'll start getting errors again, at which point you'll have to stop, refreeze it, and start over.

Each pass at this will likely give you less and less time to get the data, so prioritize. Depending on how much data you have you may not be able to get everything.

Edit: I would ONLY try this if simply slaving it to another pc doesn't work. Doing this will cause eventual condensation to build up inside the disk just due to the changes from cold to room temperature, so you WILL fail the drive this way, but it's a stopgap to mitigate total data loss if you know the drive is already tanking.

[bungiefan]

Here's your lesson on keeping backups of your important data, and having multiple hard drives in your machine for such. All data storage dies, it's a matter of when, not if.

[Myria]

Thanks for the tips guys. I will try slaving it to my desktop when I get home from work. Assuming the worst (it doesn't show up), is there a good (free?) program you can recommend in trying to recover the data, or am I hooped at that point?

[Gippo]

@ my shop, we use a bag of frozen peas. Yes, you heard it here first.

[Myria]

Got it slaved to my hard drive. The computer recognized the drive, but when I tried to access it I got a "this drive is corrupted error". Would that suggest freezing would not need to used, but rather some sort of recovery program?

[Myria]

Just wanted to thank everyone for their help again.

I ran spinrite and a partition recovery program, both came back ok, however windows still would not boot. I slaved the hard drive to my pc and ran easyrecovery pro and got back all my data (yay!). I figure this means the windows installation is corrupted, but when I tried to reinstall it showed that the hard drive was totally empty so I was a little leery of just reinstalling and losing the data (in case I missed something).

At any rate, I'm not using that HD anymore, so there is no rush to try and recover it, I just wish my computer would recognize it normally without having to use some sort of recover program.