hard disk death on vista laptop

grasscutter

Hi

i have an Dell Inspiron laptop. 6 months old (320 Gb drive)

Since yesterday it fails with disk read error during inital bootup. I ran the dell diagnostics and errors were encountered on 4 blocks during the "verify scan" with error code 0f00:1a44. After speaking to Dell they are now sending me out a new disk because they have pronounced that the disk is screwed.

My basic question is
Does anybody have recommendations for trying to get the 12Gb of pics and music I have off the disk and onto the replacement? is there a program I could use to try and recover the data on the disk?
I have an E machine running XP on the same home network so was thinking of trying to install the screwed disk on the e machine and then trying to copy the files across the network to the new disk on the laptop. I have a feeling though that wont work "in a month of sundays"

Any advice would be appreciated

thanks

grasscutter

yoyo

grasscutter wrote: »

Hi

i have an Dell Inspiron laptop. 6 months old (320 Gb drive)

Since yesterday it fails with disk read error during inital bootup. I ran the dell diagnostics and errors were encountered on 4 blocks during the "verify scan" with error code 0f00:1a44. After speaking to Dell they are now sending me out a new disk because they have pronounced that the disk is screwed.

My basic question is
Does anybody have recommendations for trying to get the 12Gb of pics and music I have off the disk and onto the replacement? is there a program I could use to try and recover the data on the disk?
I have an E machine running XP on the same home network so was thinking of trying to install the screwed disk on the e machine and then trying to copy the files across the network to the new disk on the laptop. I have a feeling though that wont work "in a month of sundays"

Any advice would be appreciated

thanks

grasscutter

If its a SATA hard disk (Very likely) and your pc supports SATA you could try booting off it in the pc and see if you could recover anything i.e: XP can see it,

Nick

grasscutter

yoyo wrote: »

If its a SATA hard disk (Very likely) and your pc supports SATA you could try booting off it in the pc and see if you could recover anything i.e: XP can see it,

Nick

Hi

Its a SATA disk. I might try that so. I was thinking the E Machine would have a fit when it saw a 320Gb disk with vista file system installed.

yoyo

Should work ok, XP should read the NTFS permissions ok, unless you encrypted the drive with bit locker or something...

Nick

machalla

You could also try Ultimate Boot CD for windows (Windows Live CD Disto)

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

If you have a usb drive you can boot with it plugged in and then attempt to copy the files to the usb drive. Or copy them over the network to your xp machine.

grasscutter

dear all

thanks for your replies.

I am going to give the ubmcd.com thing a go and see how I get on

cheers

grasscutter

Run_to_da_hills

I have recovered data on numerous occasions from both IDE & SATA drives. The drive can fail two ways, i.e. the controller card (circut board on back of hdd) or can fail through the platter / internal disk itself.(Dropping it etc) If the controller card is gone you more than likely will not hear the drive spin if put into a USB caddy. If the platter is gone you can often hear a clicking sound or an attempt to spin.

If the card is gone you need to get a control card from the EXACT same hard drive right down to the same serial and batch number and remove it from the good drive and place it on the faulty drive, make sure you wear an antistatic wrist band when working with drives.

If the platter/ disks itself is gone you need to send it off to a specialist lab that has a clean room. This can be VERY expensive, (If you know anyone working for the Garda technical bureau in Phoenix park you might get it done handy, they are constantly retrieving data from dud drives ) .

You can also try taking a chance and putting the faulty drive into the freezer, The cold can contract the platters and can sometimes give you enough time to get what you want off it. There is also various programmes like Maxblast, WD Lifeguard etc that can tell you if the drive is knacked or not.

grasscutter

yippee!!!!

The ultimate boot cd did the trick. After booting up from the cd i ran chkdsk which fixed a load of problems on the disk. Restarted and heh presto its working fine and loading vista.

The replacements disks arrived today so i am going to back up all my data and reinstall the 2 new hard disks just to be on the safe side.

cheers all!!!

grasscutter

Run_to_da_hills

grasscutter wrote: »

yippee!!!!

The ultimate boot cd did the trick. After booting up from the cd i ran chkdsk which fixed a load of problems on the disk. Restarted and heh presto its working fine and loading vista.

The replacements disks arrived today so i am going to back up all my data and reinstall the 2 new hard disks just to be on the safe side.

cheers all!!!

grasscutter

Did they ask you for the old one back? I would imagine that they would for warrenty purposes. If they don't you should put it into a USB caddy and keep it as a spare.

grasscutter

Run_to_da_hills wrote: »

Did they ask you for the old one back? I would imagine that they would for warrenty purposes. If they don't you should put it into a USB caddy and keep it as a spare.

yep....
they are coming back for the disk in 5 days