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Hard Drive recovery

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by lump_16 2 views

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Hello,

I recently came upon a problem on a clients computer where he could not boot into windows or even safe mode at all.

I went ot re-install windows and performed the scandisk which scanned for a few minutes then every file was comming up corrupt.

So I decided to fdisk and start fresh. The fdisk gave me no problems. But upon formatting it would format 3% then say: "Attempting to allocate lost unit x" so I left it sit for awhile. And then awhile longer ... and then 3 days longer still allocating lost units.

I finally purchased a new drive for the system so the client can have a computer.

I'd like to recover this hard drive but Quantum(Well now Maxtor) HD utility to run a low level format came up with errors on the pre-tests.

I looked up the errors on Maxtor and they tell me to buy a new drive.

Does anyone have any tips on hopefully recovering this drive?

Thanks,
Brian Wright
wrightweb@wright-onthe-web.com
http://www.wright-onthe-web.com

7 replies

by wacky_dragon

Sorry to tell you this but that hard drive is dead. It may not just be the actual disks that are the problem, it could be the disk motor. There might also be some damage, like a scratch, on the disks that is causing the problem.

by lump_16

Yea I pretty much assume the drive is gone but it's worth a shot to get a nice 40 GB hard drive working again for this starving college student :)

Looks like some more coasters and computer flea market items. :) (If you take apart some of the old tank hard drives of the '80's you can make more cash selling the drive platters as coasters than you can selling the drive by itself :)

Thanks for the quick responses,
Brian Wright
wrightweb@wright-onthe-web.com
http://www.wright-onthe-web.com

by alpha-male

You may be able to recover data from it by going to a professional data recovery source, but the drive itself is gone. It's too bad, but consider this...even if you got it to "kinda work" again, with the problems its showing you'll be right back to where you are now soon. The additional down time, data loss, aggravation etc just aren't worth it. Drives are pretty cheap...time and data aren't!

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