My hard Drive Crashed. Please Help!

My winxp based computer was working well until yesterday when I left it on overnight to defrag my 80gb seagate HD in safe mode. In the morning it was 34% done and I needed to restart the comp. The comp was very slow so I just paused and stopped the defrag and manually reset it. Since then my harddrive is messed up.

After trying to boot for 15 mins it gives me an error saying "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME." I tried running dskchk on the drive through the repair console and it ran incredibly slow, checking about 1% every 5-10 mins...and then after sector 40000, all the remaining sectors were "unreadable". chkdsk could not fix the hd.

Can anyone please tell me what I can do to save the hd and the data. I am trying to look for a good boot sector virus dectector that I can boot from a CD. Is there a site that I can get that from?

Also are there any data recovery programs that people reccommend to use. (So Far I have only found Spinrite and Jufsoft BadCopy Pro v3.80.1108).

Please help if you can. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Thank You,
Rominder

I agree. Any further use of the drive by you will likely just make things worse. If the data is valuable enough, I'd contact a professional data recovery company to recover what they can.

Then you defrag it, there's no choice. But there is the risk of what you describe. It's happened to me too. One can look for any indication of trouble, clicking or occasional hangs, which might suggest impending failure, before running defrag.

His old drive is dead, so he can't copy files from it. Hence the recommendation for a data recovery service.

"manually reset" as in turned the power off or hit the 'reset' button without shutting down windows? If so -- that was the cause of your problems, and not anything to do with existing problems on your HD.

there are data recovery services available, but they are expensive -- $400 minimum pricetag comes to mind.

The drive may not be dead.. just have corrupted data due to your shutdown problem. But either way, whats on there is gone.

suggestions:
1) pop in your windows CD, boot from that and install a fresh copy -- you will need to tell the install program to reformat your HD.
2) acquire a 2nd drive, install windows on that and see if you can access your first HD from the same PC
3) borrow a friends PC, and hook your drive up to that and see if you can access your HD

Kittle's suggestions 2 & 3 are very good ideas. I've been able to recover data from drives in this fashion where the problem was related to the files that were damaged rather than mechanical problems. If you heard the click of death then you *may* be able to access the drive by freezing it (in a ziplock bag) and then hooking it up (you still need a second boot device to copy to...), this solution has worked 3-4 times for me.

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2 [...] -data.html

Thanks for the help you guys...I never heard a the click of death of the harddrive. From what I can tell its a logical failure. The drive is detected on boot and goes through the boot process, but eventually gives an error 15 mins later.

This sucks if the reason I messed it up was because I manually reset. Never thought that function could be that dangerous. I had paused and stopped the defrag before...but guess that wasn't enough.

I installed windows 2000 on another drive and made the crashed hd a slave drive. However even with the messed up drive as slave ...the computer stills runs incredibly slow. Windows offers to run chkdsk on it...which took 4+ hrs to run with no results and crap load of unreadable sectors(everything after sector 40,000 or 40% chsdsk was unreadable)...I tired skipping chkdsk the second time and waited 10 mins as it was stuck on the blue/green windows 2000 load up screen with the cpu working hard as the red light was constantly flashing.

The computer works and boots up fine if I just unplug the crashed HD. So I don't think its going to be possible for me to boot up in windows with the crashed HD on. Are there any data recovery software that I can use from the boot up to get data back from the drive?

Thanks for your help.

No, all the unreadable sectors point to a hardware failure, as others have said. No software will help you there -- it's a data recovery company or the trash can.

I just meant that it wasn't data *mis-written* onto a drive that was otherwise functioning normally (e.g. overwritten boot sector), but rather a problem with the drive itself. The OP seemed to be suggesting it was the former.