OK, so i've been having some issues with my hard disk (maxtor 160gb). Firstly windows kept bluescreening on bootup, then i put it into another puter to look at it as a slave. The media (130gb) partion of the disk is fine and completely readable, but the booting win xp drive is "not formatted". Reading around the web i came to hear about Spinrite, this program that works ur disk like crazy to get back your files, but having run it for about 24 hours, it's telling me it's gona take another 2997 hours to complete (some 125(ish) days) which is far too long, surely?. I need to know if spinrite is going to work on this drive, because it has already said something about the partion table being corrupted- so it wouldn't be able to recover as much information as it liked. And i would b e very grateful if somebody could maybe suggest some other methods of preferably repairing my drive to it's former state, or at least recovering the files. NB: I can't afford to send off for data recovery. Your help is GREATLY appreciated. Just a poorper, lookin for a lil' know how...

You should do a google search on the blue screen problem for a complete explanation. Did the problem occur when the hdd was on the original pc that it and the o/s were originally installed on. If not, this is because MS in their wisdom stored h/w details on the hdd such that should it be moved, unless the new pc/mobo are the same as the previous, you get the dreaded blue screen on start up. I think the way around this is to reinstall the o/s as a recovery of existing. Good luck - Keep us posted.

If you want to retrieve your data off your HD, I suggest using Knoppix 3.6. Knoppix is actually Linux, and runs a full-blown Operating System from Your CDROM-you don't install it on your harddrive. It will read NTFS and XP. You boot from your cdrom, and open up your files in XP and either save them to a USB thumbdrive, or burn them to a CD, or if you have a slave harddrive you can drag&drop them to it. Very simple and easy to use, and works a treat. You download an ISO file, burn it to a CD, and you have a fully bootable Knoppix 6.3 disk. Best to use broadband, it is a 700 meg file. link: http://www.knoppix.org/ >Click on DOWNLOAD; >Dial down to PURDUE UNIVERSITY at the bottom, then Click on [http] just to the left; >Click on the button, "Akzeptieren>>" on the Right; >Use this download file: KNOPPIX_V3.6-2004-08-16-EN.iso It's a good link, just a pain to get to. I know there are faster-to-access ones out there, I just forget where they are. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.

The time spinrite tells you it has left to go, is calculated by how long it has been running and how much disk remains to be checked. Once it gets past the problem area, it will wizz through the remainder of the drive and the time estimate will rapidly drop. Just let it run.