Brought my Notebook back from a trip. Then the it refuses to boot up and hangs while loading windows. Tried Safe mode without sucess. Tried the recovery console with WinXP boot disks and found that C drive is not functioning. Even the "dir" failed to produce the directory listing. Tried "Chkdsk", and found "unrecoverable error" Tried "Chkdsk /r" and it hangs at 0%. Suspect the harddisk is damaged in the lugage of the trip. Any one know who to recover the data in C: in such case? Those data are VERY important to me. Thx in advance for your help^^.

You could try removing it and plugging it back in, but the odds are that it is hopeless. Recovering the data with a data recovery service would be 'extremely' expensive. Do yourself a favor BACKUP! Sorry, I do not check for private messages

Another thing you could try would be to remove it and slave it to another computer or try it in an external HDD caddy but..... I think it was damaged and you may need to bite the bullet and have the pros try to recover from it.

A pro will probably charge anywhere from a few hundered to over on thousand dollars to recover any data. It depends how much work he has to do. Is the data that important? Find out which hard drive it is and go to the manufacture website. Look for a diagnostic utility that comes as a CD ISO. Burn the ISO to a CD. Boot with CD on your laptop. Run the diagnostic on the bad drive. At least that will tell you the real condition of the drive. It also my be able to fix the drive so that it is usable again. You can run the drive externally and copy what you can from it. After that you put the drive back in the laptop and run system recovery CD on it. Note if the Windows restore disk still hangs during Windows install you might try zeroing the drive first. At the hard drive manufacturer web site look for a utility that has an option to zero the drive. I have brought back to life several drives this way. Another approach is to run it externally with another computer. There are programs you can buy to recover data. You might look for one that has a free trial version. If things look promising at this point you must purchase the software if you want to complete the recovery.

Thx for the advices.^^ I guess I would try the method of running it on my desktop.. Plan to buy a "adapter" during the weekend so that I can plug the laptop hardisk into the desktop..

Alright... Have the HDD removed and plugged into Desktop.. It is Fujitsu MHT2040AT 40GB Fujitsu diagnostic utility found no error.. seems the drive is physically intact.. Windows still cannot read the drive. Used PC Inspector to recover the data.. Good news that some files are recovered. But..for some reason, the files are all of the same size(about 1.4MB) and sometimes truncated..Why is this so? Any means to recover more files? Any means to fix the drive/diagnosize the file system?