Name: Rafi Allos Date: October 3, 2002 at 05:58:14 Pacific Subject: Hard drive failure! OS: Windows XP Home/DOS CPU/Ram: Athlon 1.33GHz/512MB DDR
Comment:
Hi I have a IBM 60GXP 40GB hard drive and to cut a long story short I was having a problem in windows and was unable to do anything so I had to do a hard reset. Then when booting up after the POST check I received the following error message "A disk read error has occured. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart". Though the BIOS could detect I had a hard drive there. This occurs before the Win XP graphical loading bar appears. I tried switching between three different IDE cables and tried using both the primary and secondary ide ports but thatdid not help at all. When booting up using the XP setup cd and going into the recovery console I discovered that the computer can read that I have three partitions all formatted as NTFS but it thinks all three of them are 100% free space. It did take much longer to load up the recovery console than it had done in the past as it took ages when checking the hard disk before going into the dos like interface and when it was checking the HDD the busy light was on permanently. I cannot hear very loud clickinhg or grinding noises then when I put my ear right next to the hard disk I could hear slight possible grinding noises though I never have done it before so it may be a normally HD sound. When running CHKDSK I was told that it appeared my hard disk has one or more unrecoverable problems. Fixing the MBR and the boot sector did not helped. I could format the disk. I am going to be getting the IBM drive fitness test as that may shed some light on the problem. I will probably try connecting it in another computer to rule out it being my motherboard or any other part of my computer and then if that does not work then I will try and connect it up as a slave and try and read it and possibly some data recovery software like Ontrack's. Does anyone know whther I will be able to at least recover the data without having to send it to an expensive specialist and does anyone know any potential fixes? I know the hard disk was not hit or dropped so all I can think of is it just died on me but then would it still be able to read the partition information?
Hi Ryan I have run DFT and g error code 0x70 - Defective Device. I would prefer not to do a low level format just yet as I have some data that I would like to recover and though I am not willing to spend for full data recovery service I was wondering whether anybody thinks that any consumer recovery software would be able to recover any data? Has anyone tried using hard drive mechanic gold as they provide a money-back guarantee if it cannot recover the data?
