Hard drive failure=data recovery efforts

[andy669]

Does anyone have any ideas on data recovery? This is the first time it has happened to me so I'm kinda lost. Most of the stuff I dont care about and can be replaced, but I had alot of pictures from christmas, and races, etc...... The O/S on the drive that failed was Win98se, my new drive has XP Professional. I set up the old drive as a secondary master and was able to copy some things over in DOS, but it seems now like the drive is dead. Any ideas/suggestions?
thanks
andy

[tireburner163]

*bump*

BTW try contacting Dinomite, he knows a lot about computers.

[andy669]

Thanks burner! I was hoping he'd see this!
andy

[Skyman]

There are many ways for data recovery, it just depends what state the drive is in.

Your running FAT 32 most likely on the old win98 drive, and most likely NTFS file system on the XP drive.

When you say you copied it in dos, you just did start-run CMD

There is no dos prompt or dos built into win XP anymore.

Has the heads on the drive crashed? Does it click or make strange sounds? Thats when data recovery gets expensive, but not impossible.

Goto CMOS at the bootup of your system and see if the drive is detected, if so find a WIN98 machine and make a boot disk off of it.

Boot up w/ the win 98 disk and when you get to dos run a quick scandisk on the crashed drive.

after you do that copy what you can over from dos.

Skyler

[1969Mach1]

Skyman expained it very well. I work for IT Services for my Goverment for co-op and we do alot of that stuff. He explained it how we would do it for the most part.

[andy669]

Originally posted by Skyman
There are many ways for data recovery, it just depends what state the drive is in.

Your running FAT 32 most likely on the old win98 drive, and most likely NTFS file system on the XP drive.

Exactly

When you say you copied it in dos, you just did start-run CMD

When I was copying files from dos I had the old drive as a secondary master. (see description below)

There is no dos prompt or dos built into win XP anymore.

hmmmm......... My copy of XP Professional does have the C: prompt command. I tried an xcopy of an entire directory but that was too much for the old drive to take. After attempting this I had to reboot cause the drive could not be found anymore. I then just copied files individually using the copy command, only a very few of them copied. DOS would act like they copied, but when I checked the directory they werent there.

Has the heads on the drive crashed? Does it click or make strange sounds? Thats when data recovery gets expensive, but not impossible.

Yes, this thing clicks like crazy!

Goto CMOS at the bootup of your system and see if the drive is detected, if so find a WIN98 machine and make a boot disk off of it.

Sometimes the drive is detected and others it isnt, I would venture to say that it is getting worse. (the more I mess with it, the less it is detected)

Boot up w/ the win 98 disk and when you get to dos run a quick scandisk on the crashed drive.

Thanks I will try that right now!

after you do that copy what you can over from dos.

Skyler

Thanks for the responses Sky and 69!