Problem is with a Toshiba MK8026GAX 80gb hard drive from a Dell Laptop (I do not have the laptop with me). This is a friends hard drive that Dell has already replaced for her, but she has files on the harddrive that she really needs to recover if at all possible. I was told that the hard drive simply stopped booting. P.S. Hard drive sounds like it spins just fine.
FIRST THING TRIED:
I have a special cable that allows me to connect the hard drive via USB to my PC. I’ve done this and I can see the hard drive in windows explorer, but when I try to open up the drive it returns the message “file or directory is corrupted and unreadable”.
NEXT THING TRIED:
I have a spare laptop (not a Dell), so I installed the hard drive and booted the laptop, but this time I received a message that said “Loading PBR 2…done” (a solid blue bar with Dell name was at the top of the screen). But it just hung there and wouldn’t go any further.
I’m currently using the Recovery Console from my Windows XP disk and I currently see 3 partitions as follows:
-: Partition1 [FAT] 63MB (55MB free)
C: Partition2 [Unknown] 71500MB (71500MB free)
E: Partition3 [FAT32] 4754MB (634MB free)
I thought that I may be able to reinstall Windows over top of the original install and the original data files would be retained safely. But…
I can’t install XP on the partition “-:” because it’s too small. So I tried installing on the “C:” partition and I receive the following message: “The partition is either too full, damaged, not formatted, or formatted with an incompatible file system. To continue installing Windows, Setup must format this partition”. Well, I can’t format it because her data will be lost then. So I tried partition “E:” and this time it says “Windows XP cannot recognize the partition you selected.”
OTHER THINGS TRIED:
I also ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the Recovery Console and neither have helped. But now I received a Boot.ini error followed by a message “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
Okay, hopefully that’s enough info. Can anyone please provide help with how I can get the data off this hard drive? I only need to retrieve a couple of files.
