Hi, I had a fully working, no probs, windows...... then on a boot, the hard drive is non bootable. i get a message on boot which says..... "searching for boot on id 0 ok" and it stays there. I tried to slave the drive on upstairs pc, and any recovery program says that the drive is divisable by 0, and will not do anything. windows asks me to format the drive as it has not been done...... but this drive was perfect on the downstairs pc (original pc). This tells me the hard drive has died. I can format, but if I do, I lose everything. I have tried every "free" recovery program I could find, but they all say either the drive is broke, or divisable by 0. Is the drive dead? or can i format it to work again? Any suggestions to recover any data would be handy, but i'm not holding my breath lol. It was only some kareoke files i wanted anyway.

i dont think the HD is dead, maybe a corrupt file or sector causing the issue, i just when ou get an issue like this format and start over, in terms of recovery if you have already tried it as a slave in another pc and it didnt work, then i think your kareoke files are gone..format it mate best option....

Have you tried the diagnostic tools available from the drive manufacturer? I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Howto Rescue Data From an Unbootable Windows PC. http://www.mepis.org/node/1450 Data Recovery with Linux http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl... One of the best tools for Windows data recovery is Linux? When all else fails and you desperately need information off of your hard drive, Linux is your safest bet. One of the best CD-bootable distributions out there is Knoppix (available for free at www.knoppix.org). Knoppix will allow you to not only possibly recover lost data that Windows simply cannot access, but also potentially fix hard drive errors and partition tables. What is Damn Small Linux, a.k.a. DSL? http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/f/ http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/downl... http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/f... http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/f... http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/f... http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/f... http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin/f... Runs from a CD, USB pendrive or embedded as guest OS. http://www.knoppix.org/ Ubuntu Linux http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ Puppy Linux http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ http://www.goosee.com/puppy/downloa...

Thank you for the great advice, i will be keeping this knoppix for handy rescues. I formatted in the end and started again. Many thanks people.