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[HeX]

So it appears it's the week of the stuffed pc, thankfully mine now all dandy (touch wood. the clean version)

Any ideas of a way to recover data from a screwed hard drive.

Can't remember what it actually said. the sysem boots but it won't load the OS, won't boot into windows using boot cd, so not boot sector, and having installed os on a nother harddrive, win xp doesn't acknowledge existance of hard drive but the bios does.

Any way to recover the data apart from sending away to someone expensive. The freezer is our next thing to try.

Any help really appreciated guys.

[Chaos]

is the hdd still in your pc?
if so, do the following

go to Start > Control Panel > Administstative Tools > Computer Management

Then find the disk management section (should be on the left somewhere under Storage

(this would be easier over steam friends)

[HeX]

um no.... as windows does not detect the hdd, but thanks for the idea

[Chaos]

then you either need to put it in, or get a sata-usb dock, theyr cheap enough (about £20ish)

[Guilt is a rope... etc]

Knoppix linux can be used to recover data, if you boot from a live CD

http://www.knoppix.org/ (click flag for english)

A guide to using it...

http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

[Magathery]

Just so I got this straight in my mind, how are the hard drives plugged in? For a start I'm assuming that you've got more than one in the case. Are we talking IDE or SATA? If it's 2 IDE hard drives, are they both on the same IDE cable? If it's SATA, have you tired re-seating the data cable at both ends or tirying a different SATA socket if one is avalible?

Chaos's idear about the caddy is a good one. Might just be a faulty cable from the mother board to the hard drive, or it could be a naggered socket. Or it just might be that the hard drive is shafted.

Good luck.

[PapaFade]

No the hard drive is knackered. Using the same cable (IDE) on another HDD after install a fresh copy of XP on it yesterday, no issues at all. We just want to recover the data off the shafted one.

[Magathery]

Get a caddy and hope and prey that it's readable.

What is it? Shafted MBR?

[PapaFade]

Bios can detect the exhistence of the drive, reads model no etc, but when booting from it, the bios detects an ide failure. Windows doesn't detect it when booting from CD or the fresh install. Is a caddy going to be able to access it in a way the pc currently doesn't?

[Guilt is a rope... etc]

Have you tried the Linux thing yet?

[PapaFade]

Not yet m8.

[Magathery]

Shoving the drive in, say, a USB caddy should mean that when it's plugged into a windows PC it's think of it as a mass storage USB devise. So hopefully the onboard electronic wizardry will then be able to access the drive.

I've only have a limited experiance with caddys. Once uppon a time I had a 2.5" drive that refused to play with anyone. Wouldn't format or fdisk when trying to install windows to it. Slung it in a caddy and formatted the little smegga. Worked after that. I think the MBR went a bit wobberly and the caddy either got it to work ot was so simple that it bypassed it some how.

Good luck.

[Junta]

Hex.. Just download all your pron all over again?

[Finaldeath]

Sounds like it's buggered. The BIOS can quite often read the model number and info since it doesn't access any actual data, but as soon as it does - if it's a problem with the actual drive, it'll not work.

You'll want to try Knoppix, but if it doesn't detect it, and you've tried it in another PC, well...

It looks, to me, like either you'll be taking it to an expert (for possibly mucho money), or knocking your head on a wall and, at this very moment, buying a set of nice external hard drives and setting up backup routines.

You don't want it to happen again: A warning to all, back up that data, yes, that data, right now! Do it! DOOO ITTTT!!!!

[PapaFade]

Thanks for the input everyone, but we've now tried everything and it's toast.