Crashed hard disk ... please advise

Any idea if a reinstall of the WinXP OS would impact my existing data files? I am not sure but I think the OS goes to specific parts of a hard disk which, technically, should mean no impact on my existing data files.

It won't affect your existing data files as long as you don't tell it to format the hard disk. That will be one of the options during the install and it will give you a warning about data deletion so you can't miss it.

How old is your PC? If it's fairly new it should have SATA. I'd recommend getting 2 data drives and setting up mirroring. That's my set up at home - RAID0 basically mirrors all data from one disk to the other. That way if one drive fails I lose nothing. I know this is locking the door after the horse has bolted but might save you some heartache in the future.

Hi Anthony,
From the sounds of it, the clicking I mean, is that the reading heads on the disk are about to come loose. I didn't read to whole thread but I saw that the lads were suggesting recovery software, that s deffinetly the way to go if the disk lasts that long. In work we have this problem all the time and if the data is very valuable we send it out to a crowd that re-consitutes the drive by opening it in a vacum and recreates the drive from stratch.

believe it or believe it not, when the disk is completely gone and it won't read anything off the disk, as a last ditch effort we have put the disk in a freezer over night and 1 out of 5 times it will work, but you have to try and get everything of the disk staright away. It has something to do with the reading heads and the disk contracting with heat and age, and sticking to the disk.

It sounds whacky, but it has worked on many occasions for me so.....

I just read more of the thread and since it isn't clicking then forget the above . I would slave that disk internally off another disk and change the jumpers on the disk to slave. Then straight away schedule a check disk on that the slaved disk. If it doesn't show up in my computer, it is usually the jumpers settings on the master or slaved disk.

My two cents :roll:

Best of luck and let us know how it goes!!

Regards

Sean

Anthony,

I the files on it are *really* important to you, the best advice I can give is take it to a professional recovery firm. They are expensive but you are at far less risk. Any tinkering you might try could very easily make things worse.

Hope it works out for you.

Hi Anthony,
As an exercise I have just connected a 500mb USB hard drive to my sysytem and ran ZAR. It found the drive no problem and listed its contents.
My USB drive is a dedicated USB 2 drive. Yours appears to be a an internal hard drive which you are trying to connect through a USB port by means of a USB mini port

Question. Is it powered from the USB port? Some motherboards cannot power another hard drive through a USB port. I have a seperate mains connection for my USB hard drive. I didn't even try to run it directly through USB power only. I have been down that road before and wrecked a motherboard. So be careful there!

When I want into "My Computer", it showed it properly as "Drive E:" and with 34 Gb free (which is accurate). I also got a complete directory listing including the subfolders ... which is very encouraging. When I try and copy one or more files (or folders) back to my drive C (my recovery drive), it is there that I get a message that reading is temporarily not possible.

This is exactly the message I received when I thrashed my hard drive. In your case I think the volume settings became corrupt when you interupted defragmentation. So your files are still there. Its just that the OS does not know where to find them any more because it's "index " is missing so to speak. ZAR can look for missing volumes and to some extent reconstruct them if it can.
My thrashed hard drive was an internal secondary drive powered off the power supply. So I think putting the hard drive back into a known working system, with its jumper settings switched to slave is the best way to go, as has already been pointed out. Check in the bios on boot up and see if it is recognised as a slave. If I recall correctly I spent a good 24 hours over a weekend recovering my data, a lot of which was spent looking up info on the web before I proceeded with each step.

Failing all this you can mail it to me and I will give it a go for you!
Brian

Gentlemen,

I got a call from the local professional data recovery service and they confirmed for me that the problem with the hard disk is physical as opposed to logical/software.

They asked me to locate a second hard disk with precisely the same specs as the crashed disk so as to presumably transfer the magnetic media onto the new unit.

Is anyone aware of any outfit in Ireland (with a web presence) whom I can contact with my requirements? I need the following:

Seagate 60 Gb hard disk .... model ST960822A
PN:9w3237-505
FW.02
Site: AMK
Made in Singapore
PCB: 1003422440 REV A

I have sent an email to Seagate Tech Support to find out how perfectly I have to match these specs and whether they can help me obtain such a unit (which I doubt).

I have found a unit on eBay which seems to match perfectly but the fellow will only ship within the US and he is selling the PCB.

Thanks for any possible leads and advice.

Anthony,
I cannot find a company in Ireland that sells this hard drive but here is one in the UK that may have what you are looking for.
This is their web page.
www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?P...&source=Dealtime

Hope this is the one,
Brian