Trouble with "Error Performing Inpage Operation"

Hi everyone, I’ve been building my own systems for a couple years now and I usually do my own tech support but this one has me stumped. First my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8500) stopped booting, giving me a BSOD every time I tried. I took out the HD and mounted it in an external drive enclosure (NexStar USB 2.0) and hooked it up to my desktop to get the data off it before reformatted the drive, assuming at this point that it was just a corrupted copy of windows I was dealing with. However, when I tried to open the drive in windows explorer I got a “can not read drive F: Error Performing Inpage Operation” message. I tried rebooting the system a couple times to no avail. After an online search the only info I was able to find was that my HD was probably failing and to try Ontrack’s Easy Recovery Pro. I tried the software and I was able to see the data on the drive just fine, but to get it off I will have to buy the software. This is going to set me back about $90. It’s worth it to me to get the data(serves me right for not backing up my data as often as I should), but I hate to shell out the cash if I’m just missing something simple that would let me access the drive. Thank you in advance for your advice, I’ve found the comments on this site invaluable over the years.

System Specs.

Desktop

MB: Asus P5WD2-Premium
Ram: 2gig Balistix-667
CPU: P4 3.4ghz
GPU: ATI X850 PE
OS: XP Pro SP2

Laptop: Dell Inspiron 8500

Ram: 640
CPU: P4 Mobile 2.4ghz
GPU: ATI 9000 mobile
OS: XP Home SP2
HD: Toshiba 30gig

If I’ve missed any important specs, please let me know

ah b****r...no luck for me as it reports im out of space - strangely, the xp disk mangement reports no files system (ie. not ntfs) and that the disk is empty!
looks like i'll continue off loading files at the snails pace

'...Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>chkdsk f: /r
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is IBM_PRELOAD.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
File record segment 45772 is unreadable.
File record segment 45773 is unreadable.
File record segment 45774 is unreadable.
File record segment 45775 is unreadable.
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
Deleting an index entry from index $O of file 6654.
Deleting an index entry from index $O of file 6654.
Deleting an index entry from index $O of file 6654.
Deleting an index entry from index $O of file 6654.
Deleting index entry manifest.xml in index $I30 of file 25465.
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is recovering lost files.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
The disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters
detected in file 6898 of name \pagefile.sys.

An unspecified error occurred.

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>

Wow! Let me say an awed and amazed "THANK YOU" to anonymous whoever you are, and to Tom for providing a platform to search for this kind of help. My Fantom Drive external HD came up lame and your precise elegant solution saved 100 gigs of family photos and a presentation for the congregation that had to be given this Sunday morning. I'm not trying to prosletyze (probably can't even spell it) but I do hope you get some kind of reward where you may least expect it for such random (and unboastful) acts of kindness. Really helped us out here in Michigan.

New friend of anonymous
Scott

Thank you SO much. You helped me save a hard drive with 10 years worth of photos.

Another big THANK YOU to anonymous! I just tried this on a hard drive that I was not able to see and it worked perfectly!

I had the "error performing inpage operation" message as well and the USB dongle was not sufficient to fix my HDD. The CHKDSK worked for me too. THANKS!

SettledDnRoamer

Hi,

I have the same problem and try to do the chkdsk thing, but my commandline says "access denied" - what should I do?

uhhh,... thanks to anonymous and all of u here chkdsk ery very trealy working and was solve my problemm,... very2 thanks a lot to u alll,...

thanks for all the info especially to anonymous . agr8 big thanks...save myself from having to format my ext hard disk and prevent outsiders to view my private data.. oh well .. thanks again.. chkdsk is a big help indeed..

... i dont know if the 4, 5, 6, 7 pattern means anything

Hi

Ive had a similar problem. I plugged in an external HD into a laptop and soon I was receiving baloons stating that data from my HD had been lost. When I plugged the HD into my own laptop I got the same message and the HD will not open to show my folders although it is there. When I try and open anything from a software such as Microsoft Word I get the message "Error performing inpage operation". When right clicking on the properties it also says that there is 0 free space and 0 used. The hard drive will open with a Mac but have tried on several PCs and it won't work. I tried the suggestion from annonymous and the following are the results:

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stag 2 of 3)...
Correcting error in index $130 for file 45431.
Correcting error in index $130 for file 45431.
Correcting error in index $130 for file 45431.
Insufficient disk space to correct errors
in index $130 of file 45431.

It is true that the HD is almost full. Is there anything else that I can do to access the file, this is my entire work computer on the HD!