Corrupted SATA HD - please help
 

Hi

I have a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120GB SATA HD which has gone duff, in a Dell PC.

Dell put in a new one under their on-site warranty but they can't help with the old one.

The old one was connected to the secondary HD controller and after some intermittent problems (possibly temperature dependent) the BIOS now recognises it correctly.

However XP doesn't. It says it isn't formatted. Upon boot-up it spent hours reporting lots of duff clusters. The partition is NTFS.

It could be a duff controller PCB, or (less likely I think) a fault elsewhere.

Can any data recovery experts here suggest anything I can do? The data on it isn't priceless but is probably worth a few hundred quid - a huge amount of aggro really.

Hi,

You could put the drive into a Linux PC and see if Linux see's it any better than XP, otherwise a data recovery company would be your best bet.

Hope this helps

Trev

Interesting - I don't have one handy. I suspect a part of the data structure is damaged.... the question is what if anything can be usefully recovered from NTFS. I know one can recover a lot of stuff from FAT16 or FAT32, so long as at least one FAT is OK.

Can anyone suggest any software one could try, or perhaps a company that doesn't charge thousands?

You can get a cd based disto of Linux that will run fully from a cd called Knoppix (www.knoppix.org).

You should be able to interrogate the disk with this method and then dump any data to CD/USB key.

There are plenty of data recovery companies that will do the job for hundreds rather than thousands, alternatively try Norton Systemworks for around £100

Just been looking around and there\'s something called Knoppix-STD which is a linux distro again on CD with lots of security tools, one of which is data recovery.

However - it is NOT for a beginner!

http://www.knoppix-std.org/index.html