Hard drive failure--Data recovery?

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d3nny_j

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i have a Maxtor 120gb SATA hard drive which i'm trying to salvage the data off of. I've tried to plug it into a known working computer. BIOS recognizes it but then it takes forever to boot the system up (which is on another hard drive) and once the OS has booted, i'm unable to get windows to detect the drive. Could someone please help...maybe point me in the right direction. i'm at a loss. thank you!!
 

tokencode

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Try data recovery software such as R-Studio (R-TT.com). Before you try to do anything,, image the drive to other storage and work off the image, further activity on the failing drive can ruin your chances of getting the data. It should be able to read whatever is left of the file system and recover whatever is there.
 

d3nny_j

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You mentioned using a data recovery tool. I tried with SpinRite and got to the part where it lists the drives' information.

I'll leave the details here:

Partition/item details

Invalid partition for drive size. The partition exceeds the size of this drive as defined by the system's BIOS or BIOS extension. You should not proceed to use SpinRite on this drive until you have verified and corrected the disparity between this drive and the BIOS's or BIOS extension's understanding of the drive size.

Um yea so i didn't go any further with SpinRite. I assume this is the drive i'm looking for. The other ones didn't list any errors. I was wondering if i should try to repartition the drive and if so i wouldn't be able to do it from Windows since Windows doesn't detect the drive. Its only detected in the BIOS. Yea so i'm kind of at a loss as to what i should do at this point. Any suggestions? Hopefully you'll have a clue...cuz i don't. ; )

 
What capacity and model number are reported for the drive in BIOS?

What does SpinRite think the capacity is?

Have you installed the drive's Alternate Capacity jumper? If so, then this limits the capacity to 32GB.

Could we see the partition table and boot sector with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt.

BTW, I agree with tokencode. That is, clone your drive sector-by-sector ASAP, and then work on the clone.


BTW, if your drive has bad media or weak heads, then SpinRite will potentially accelerate the drive's failure. This is because it keeps hammering away at bad sectors until it succeeds in reading them, or until it exhausts the number of retries (1000 ???).
 

pepe2907

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If you repartition the drive it will further impede possible data recovery.
Your link is not working, but I suggest trying another recovery software. IMHO a good one shouldn't be stopped of what it says about the partition size /the partition record is probably damaged, that's why it reads wrong size/.
I think he can't copy the data from the drive, until he finds some way to read it, isn't that right?
 

tokencode

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Don't use spinrite, use R-studio, you need to image hte drive first, not try to repair sectors on it. Please down load R-studio (R-tt.com) it has a free trial, image the drive and try to recover from the image.
 
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