IDE 44 Pin HDD Recovery from DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1 Broken Partition Table

Dgoodale5

Honorable
Feb 21, 2012
12
0
10,510
I have a hard drive from the early 90's and it is around 200 mb. It is a 44 pin IDE drive, and I still have the laptop that it belonged too which is still running. The problem is, the hard drive is beginning to fail. It is starting not to boot off and on, and is giving weird errors. Sometimes the laptop won't even turn on. Also the only way to get data off is through the floppy drive, which is broken. I need to get the important data files off from the hard drive, it has important program files to operate a machine for a company. I tried plugging it into Windows XP and Windows 7, through an IDE to USB adapter, but the partition table is so broken it does not even recognize the correct size of the drive( 0 mb free out of 0 mb), and the file system. I also used that same adapter and tried to use Acronis, but had the same result. I also tried accessing it from a Linux Machine, but it didn't even recognize the drive at all. I have no idea what to do.

Any help is much appreciated...

Thanks
 
Solution
You have gotten way more years of use out of that drive than ever intended. That drive should have been backed up from the beginning and replaced 10+ years ago.

Your only hope now is to stop messing with that drive all together and send it in for professional recovery if its worth that much to you.

j2j663

Distinguished
Apr 29, 2011
414
0
18,860
You have gotten way more years of use out of that drive than ever intended. That drive should have been backed up from the beginning and replaced 10+ years ago.

Your only hope now is to stop messing with that drive all together and send it in for professional recovery if its worth that much to you.
 
Solution
Some of those USB-IDE adapters have trouble with those very old drives, particularly those made by WD. Can you see the drive with HD Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo?

What kind of "weird errors" are you seeing?

The physical capacity of the drive is reported via the ATA Identify Device command, not via the partition table.