Backing up a corrupt hard disk

TechRepublic has a download available, 200 ways to revive a hard drive. One way is to put it in the freezer for a short time, the hard drive will function long enough to get the data off it.

Check out the article as this is only 1 of the tricks to get data off a "dead" hard drive.

Good Luck!

Use a kit from Apricorn called the EZ-Gig Hard drive upgrade kit. This kit comes with a PCMCIA hard drive card and a notebook harddrive upgrade. In your case put the new drive in the laptop. Load the OS and whatever else you want on it. Then putthe PCMCIA card in the machine with the old drive attached. The machine should see the new drive and you should be able to transfer data. However your drive may have crashed so be prepared for nothing to transfer.

Just a side note concerning the transfer kit. It is usually inteded to be used as a hard drive upgrade. The included software allows you to transfer (image) the partition of your old drive to the new drive (much like Norton Ghost). After the image transfer the new drive goesinto the laptop, and the old drive is used as secondary storage with the PCMCIA card. When a laptop drive has failed here where I work, we load the new drive with OS drivers and apps, then put the old drive on the card and try to transfer data. Ifthe drive hasn't crashed it should work. Hope this info helps.

Here is a possible solution...

Put the bad drive in the freezer for at least 24 hours.
Try to load your operating system on the new drive so you can boot to it. Now set the "bad" drive as a slave and boot to the master.

Now make a directory on the c:\ drive called disk or old disk.

now go the the dos-prompt within windows and type the following...Change to the d:\ (assuming the old drive is now d:) drive:\xcopy *.* c:\(new directory) /s/e/r/f/h/i/c/k/y

the full should look like the following provided the hard disk is c: and the slave or bad disk is d:. ....d:\xcopy *.* c:\olddisk\ /s/e/r/f/h/i/c/k/y

Hope this helps

I don't know if this will work, but it's something I would try if I were in the same situation.
Try booting to DOS from your WIN98 startup diskette, and then try copying files without starting Windows. You might also try adding basic network drivers tot he startup diskette so you could copy the files to a network drive.