Error loading operating system

[plutocat]

So I have a harddrive that recently went all commando and stopped working. It won't load windows and stops at a dos prompt with the "Error loading Operating System" message. If I try to boot from my windows 7 cd it freezes at the bluish screen with the big white mouse cursor (beginning of install screen I guess you can call it). So my question is, can this harddrive be salvaged and/or can my data be recovered? Thanks.

 

[hang-the-9]

Depends on what happened to the drive and how much you are willing to spend to fix it. Just about any drive can have it's data saved, but a professional data recovery would start at a few hundred and go up from there.

Try the drive as a secondary in another PC, see if it sees it that way.

 

[plutocat]

So the drive is showing up in BIOS as well as in Computer Management. However, it's showing it as unallocated, but online. Is there a way I can save this drive and use it once again?

Also shows up in device manager and says the device is working properly.

 

[hang-the-9]

If the computer sees it, you can try to use testdisk to recover partition info.

 

[plutocat]

so i was able to get some info and found my drive in Computer Management. I ended up formatting my drive to make it usable once more. I'm guessing since I "formatted" it this way all data is lost forever? please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong!

 

[hang-the-9]

You can use a data recovery software to try to get your data back. Recuva works pretty well.

If you tried testdisk first, you may have been able to avoid having to format it.