Hard Drive Problems - can anyone help?

Hi guys I was wondering if anyone could offer any suggestions to help me retrieve data from my 2.5" laptop's hard drive.

The other day I right clicked my xp network connection icon and got the dreaded blue screen of death!

I tried a reboot and got a message about windows files being missing or corrupt.

After several attempts it managed to get past this error but I got another blue screen of death just before xp booted fully. The message said somethnig about "unmountable windows volume".

So I tried removing the hard drive and putting it into my pc. The pc recognised the drive in hardware properties but within explorer no drive letters were showing for the 2.5" drive from my laptop.

I should mention that the drive is divided into 2 with a partition. I decided to try and reinstall xp on the first partition back in my laptop. It got as far as selecting a drive to install to and when I select "c" - the original location of windows it tries to format the drive. When I select quick format it says it cannot continue. If I try a full format the machine just hangs on 0%.

I then tried installing xp on the same partition but in my pc. Again it gets as far as selecting a drive to install to but this time does not recognise or show any partitions or drive to install to. If I try to select or continue I get a blue screen of death!

Any ideas what is going on? Is my drive ready for the hammer? Or are is there any software out there which maybe able to repair what seems to be an issue with the partition table?

I do not want to complete delete all partitions and format as I have data which I would like to retrieve if possible from the second partition.

Any help or feedback would be appreciate.

Many thanks,

Rob.

This sounds like the drive is dying....taking it's last gasps. But you might still be able to recover files. When you installed the laptop drive in your PC you may have had to assign it a drive letter before the PC could see it. You have to do this from the management console ( right click my computer, choose manage ). Then check under the Disk Management section. You then click on the drive and assign a letter. But honestly it sounds like curtains for the drive. I have been able to hook a failing drive upto a USB adapter and been able to recover some files. You can pick up a laptop to USB adapter for $20-$30. But I think you are going to have to buy a new drive. If the laptop isn't anything special then you can get a 40gb drive for about $50. And if you move upto a 5400 or 7200rpm drive you may see a performance increase in your laptop ( assuming the orriginal is a 4200rpm unit ). Good Luck, and I hope this helps.

You will need a 44 to 40 pin adapter to connect it to your desktop pc if its not a sata. These adapters can be picked up for around $7.00 You may need to remove your other PATA device so you don't have a conflict.

If you want a real speed deamon go for the Hitachi 7K100 drive. The power consuption is a 10% hit (over a 4200), for a 80% gain in performance. NO more waiting for things to load. Your notebook temp may actually drop around 5c due to less disk access time. Mine did.

I have used 2.5 hdds in my computers a few times. You need to check the PIN configuration for setting it to master/slave. I just borrowed a pin from one of my cd drives.

Connect it the the secondary IDE cable and set it to master. It should work properly after that, and you don't need to assign it a drive letter, XP will do that when it finds the drive.

Hope that helps,

Matt

What I would try next is to download the HDD's manufacturer's utilities. Hopefully they can tell you what is going on w/ the drive. Since it appears in the hardware properties, it should be recognized by the BIOS?

You just have to go to the manufacturer's website, or search for the "ultimate boot CD" - it contains the majority of all manufacturers' HDD utilities.

Hopefully you can run some diagnostic and find out if its dead or what.

But it sounds pretty bad, IMO. Hope I'm wrong though.

PS. another thought - you can try to run w/ knoppix or another OS - perhaps those might be able to detect the drive. Knoppix has a live CD that you can run like a boot CD.