Hard Drive Failure Help
 

Hi, I’m trying to recover files from my crashed hard drive. I hope you can help.


I crashed my 40 Gig Maxtor hard drive while running Win XP Home. It started to make noise and then died. I believe it was a FAT 32, as the Windows was upgraded from Win 98. I was unable to start the computer, as during boot up, I received a notice Primary Master Hard Drive Failure

I have now installed a WD 80 Gig hard Drive running XP Home. I would like to salvage the files from my old drive and put them on this new one. When I boot the computer with both drives connected, I can see both drives in CMOS but during the boot it tells me there was a Secondary Master hard Drive Failure (the Maxtor one). When I press F1 to proceed, XP Home loads. In XP, I can only see the new drive, not the old, problematic one. I have run PCI File Recovery, GetDataBack, FindPart all to attempt to see that other drive, but have been unsuccessful.

When I boot to dos (using an old Win 98 disk), I can see the old Maxtor HD in the B: When I run ‘dir’ in dos, sometimes I see many files/directories, sometimes very few, sometimes none. Also, sometimes the file names are correct, while sometimes I see strange computer characters. I have tried to use the ‘copy’ command to copy files I have seen in ‘dir’ to the new WD hard drive, but it has been unsuccessful, stating that it doesn’t find the files. It seems that it is randomly finding some files randomly, but not consistently able to find them, thus, I am unable to know what it will find each time I search.

Can you help me save my files? Thanks!

It sounds like that hard drive is gone for good.

It is possible to give it to a commercial recovery service but they remove the actual
disk out of the drive and deal with it from there. It can cost hundreds of dollars.
Most home users won't pay that kind of money to recover data.