Well I know how it is i've been down the corrupted hard drive road lots of times. The only thing I can think of right off is if you can access that hard drive on a another computer you could copy all of the songs, videos, photos, games saves or anything else that needs backup or may need to be saved just to be safe and then do a format and reinstall of XP. Maybe someone else here will have a better answer then that.

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I reject your reality, and substitute my own.

SETI@home classic workunits: 5,000
SETI@home classic CPU time: 15,019 hours

Sounds like a job for "fdisk /mbr" (corrects and re-writes Master Boot Record).
FDISK /MBR rewrites the Master Boot Record

Bootable CD
Boot Floppys

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Boinc Button Abuser In Training >My Shrubbers<

The question I would ask:
Do you have access to another working computer?
Yes - is the drive in the bad machine compatible with the working system?
- -Yes - Put it in the working system, if it's IDE, jumper it as a slave drive,
then copy the data off of it, if it's SATA, just make sure you boot off
of the good drive.
- - No - Get an external drive enclosure, try accessing it from the working
computer that way. (I have a couple that were in the $30 range)
No - Get a new replacement drive, load OS on it, put in bad drive as a second
drive and try to get data from it. If the computer does not support a
second drive inside for some reason, use the external drive enclosure
method to try to copy the files from the bad drive onto the new one.

Personally, I'd try one of these methods before trying to do anything that will change the data on the bad HD, you can always try other methods if the above ones fail.

-Dave

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Historically Spinrite was a hardware disk analyzer, which could reformat sector interleave patterns to optimize performance. This is below file system level.

The usual fix is to restore from your backups... you do have backups don't you?
If you don't look after your data, you are just asking for months of misery and regret and it's a really painful way to fully appreciate its value!

Recovering data of hard drives and rebuilding directory and file indexes is something I did for a living and is extremely time consuming picking through bytes on millions of sectors, so it can cost at least $1000+ to fix/recover/rescue.
Nowadays drives are so big and indexes so complicated it is next to impossible to manually reconstruct by hand, though it can be possible find and extract some files if they aren't fragmented, but it isn't guaranteed.

fdisk /mbr might work, but I would investigate the cause - sometimes it's just spurious and can't be defined, eg phase of the moon or other silly reason!
Usual scandisk, chkdsk /f and ensure there's sufficient cooling for the drive too. However, it is scary enough not to put total faith in the drive after this, so always backup every day, or at least make sure you have multiple copies of important stuff on multiple drives, and preferably off site too.
Hard disks are so cheap nowadays and it takes little time just to mirror everything to a backup USB drive, or even upload to an online archive facility.

If fdisk /mbr doesn't work, then put the disk in another machine with another empty drive and use Zero Assumption Recovery to scan and extract what it can find to the blank disk. Make sure that you don't write to the bad disk!

Hope that helps.

Another trick to get any data off is to copy the data to another HDD using the Windows "rescue" cd or a Linux "LiveCD".

The second HDD could be an external HDD or one on another PC or one temporarily put in the poorly machine.

Good luck,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

I can vouch for the Linux LiveCD option, I burned a copy of Knoppix myself. Had to do this after trying to convert a drive from FAT32 to NTFS rendered Windows unbootable. Knoppix was able to recover all the documents and then save them to a Windows share on another computer. I just reinstalled Windows from the OEM supplied recovery disk. This might not be the best option though, if you've never touched Linux before.

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One thing that saved my A$$ recently :

- I attached the dud drive to another working machine [as secondary]
- booted into windows [off its normal primary drive], waited, the drive came up as drive D:
- tried to look in the drive: Windows came up "The Drive Is not Formatted, Would you like to format it now?" [Answer NO!]
-Ran Testdisk (freeware from http://www.cgsecurity.org/, included on many live rescue boot CD's, or downloadable separately, does MANY MANY kinds of file systems inc MAC, my brother inlaw rescued data from a dead firewire mac drive with it recently too)
- Analysed the disk with testdisk (complex process), It found the partition.
- Listed the files in the partition
- copied the desired folders/files out to another drive [ Took AGES, Drive really STUFFED]
- Tried a testdisk repair of the boot & partition records, NOGO as mentioned before disk was really stuffed. well previous step got files off anyway :D
- Old drive is sitting in a cupboard now, in case i missed copying anything off that I need. Haven't needed anything more from it for 3 weeks now.[ Maybe one day I'll give it another go over then BIN IT :D]

If everything else looks hopeless, I'd give this a try, but it means a little reading [Possibly the least user friendly program I have ever used, but the only thing that worked on my and my brother inlaw's drives]. [ There are other options in testdisk that work well if the problem is not hardware damage, say an accidently deleted partition or damaged master boot record that fdisk/mbr couldn't fix, but they take a LONG time and you need space on another drive equal to the drive you are trying to rescue]

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

Well, I've been messing with this for hours now. I tried windows XP startup disk using every command that would help. chkdsk, fdisk /mbr etc. I used the windows XP operating system cd and tried to repair the boot, bootcfg /rebuild, bootcfg /scan. All with errors. Now I'm back to looking for freeware to repair the boot sector and or partition repair.

I've tried most of the suggestions you guys have posted so far. I'll give the program Jason suggested (TestDisk) a try. I'm probably going to give up on it for tonight, I'm seriously tired.

Thanks for your help everyone. :)

Don't forget to try the HDD makers site. Most have utility programs for their products, usually a modified version of Disk Manager.

Andy

This sounds more and more like a hardware failure. I'm sure you're aware of those data recovery services. I remember reading an article on those in PCMag not too long ago. Don't remember how much they charge to recover your data, but if everything else fails...

Regards,
Wander

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One thought that I had....
You showed a picture of the drive in an external enclosure. I am assuming USB from the enclosure to the computer. Is is possible that there is some problem with the USB adapter/enclosure?
Have you tried removing the drive from the enclosure and booting or accessing it using it's native interface?

Would tech support at SpinRite be of any help, seeing as you bought their recovery program? Maybe they have some other angles to offer.

Best of luck, I know from experience these things can be real hair pulling excercises.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I had a similar problem and after much messing around the FDISK /MBR command did indeed fix it. Acting on a tip in a discussion thread I booted from an old copy of a Windows 98 rescue diskette and ran that version of FDISK. I had already tried this command without success, the Win 98 boot disk was the key. (Had to ask about 10 friends before I found one who never throws out anything.)

Good luck!

Edit. IMPORTANT. As noted in the Microsoft link provided by ohiomike above:
"NOTE: The fdisk /mbr command only re-writes the MBR on the system drive (DISK-0) using BIOS calls. You cannot specify any other drive for the fdisk /mbr command to operate on other than DISK-0."

So, as msattler suggests, you will have to install this as a system disk, not external. You will also have to strap it as the first physical drive and boot from the '98 rescue floppy.

I had a similar problem and after much messing around the FDISK /MBR command did indeed fix it. Acting on a tip in a discussion thread I booted from an old copy of a Windows 98 rescue diskette and ran that version of FDISK. I had already tried this command without success, the Win 98 boot disk was the key. (Had to ask about 10 friends before I found one who never throws out anything.)

Good luck!

Edit. IMPORTANT. As noted in the Microsoft link provided by ohiomike above:
"NOTE: The fdisk /mbr command only re-writes the MBR on the system drive (DISK-0) using BIOS calls. You cannot specify any other drive for the fdisk /mbr command to operate on other than DISK-0."

So, as msattler suggests, you will have to install this as a system disk, not external. You will also have to strap it as the first physical drive and boot from the '98 rescue floppy.

He had said that this disk was using XP op sys. He would have to stick with XP rather than 98, no?

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I had a similar problem and after much messing around the FDISK /MBR command did indeed fix it. Acting on a tip in a discussion thread I booted from an old copy of a Windows 98 rescue diskette and ran that version of FDISK. I had already tried this command without success, the Win 98 boot disk was the key. (Had to ask about 10 friends before I found one who never throws out anything.)

Good luck!

Edit. IMPORTANT. As noted in the Microsoft link provided by ohiomike above:
"NOTE: The fdisk /mbr command only re-writes the MBR on the system drive (DISK-0) using BIOS calls. You cannot specify any other drive for the fdisk /mbr command to operate on other than DISK-0."

So, as msattler suggests, you will have to install this as a system disk, not external. You will also have to strap it as the first physical drive and boot from the '98 rescue floppy.

He had said that this disk was using XP op sys. He would have to stick with XP rather than 98, no?

I would have thought so too, and did try that first since I too am running XP on that machine, but to no avail. For some silly reason the '98 version of FDISK worked. BTW, before trying this (and considering the counterintuitive nature of doing so) I found mention of using '98 on Symantec's web site in addition to the discussion thread. I guess I trusted them a little more than someone's opinion on a board.

Edit. I'm sorry to be always using the edit feature, but it seems that I always think of something else to say after I read my own post.
- I don't believe the MBR is OS version specific. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it basically just contains pointers to start the boot process. Also, it sounds like CR is in the same boat that I was in, namely I had tried "everything else" and had not much to lose at that point.
I tried linking the Symantec page but the link didn't work from here. Search for Fdisk /MBR on their homepage. Look at "note" in step one of the first search hit.

Nobody has mentioned Partition Magic yet.

I just Googled it, and see that it has now been assimilated into the Symantec empire.

I used an earlier version when it was owned by Powerquest. It used to fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Current version is ~22MB and costs $69.95 to download.

I guess it depends how important your data is.

PM me for more info if you like.

[edit] See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_partition_utilities.

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Sir Arthur C Clarke 1917-2008

SpinRite can only work on an external drive if:
A) The BIOS allocates "DOS" drive letters for external USB/Firewire drives -OR-
B) A DOS USB/Firewire hard disk device driver is loaded and assigns a drive letter prior to running SpinRite.

Are you sure you ran SpinRite on the external?

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Congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BTW, someone made a suggestion of creating a mirror drive on an earlier post. I recently purchased a hard drive with backup software included which I haven't installed yet.

My question is - is it better to use some type of mirror software vs backup software or are they for all intent and purposes the same thing? If they're not the same thing and mirroring is a better way to go - any suggestions?

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Congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BTW, someone made a suggestion of creating a mirror drive on an earlier post. I recently purchased a hard drive with backup software included which I haven't installed yet.

My question is - is it better to use some type of mirror software vs backup software or are they for all intent and purposes the same thing? If they're not the same thing and mirroring is a better way to go - any suggestions?

I've had VERY good luck with Acronis True Image. It does WinDoze and also will back up Linux Images.

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Boinc Button Abuser In Training >My Shrubbers<

Congratulations!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BTW, someone made a suggestion of creating a mirror drive on an earlier post. I recently purchased a hard drive with backup software included which I haven't installed yet.

My question is - is it better to use some type of mirror software vs backup software or are they for all intent and purposes the same thing? If they're not the same thing and mirroring is a better way to go - any suggestions?

I've had VERY good luck with Acronis True Image. It does WinDoze and also will back up Linux Images.

Thanks for the input.

I did a google search and according to the article below, there are only two programs to consider with everyone else lagging behind. It was interesting reading.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/drive-imaging-reviews.htm

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Good Gawd!! I was just about to try another recover program, turned the computer on and the damn thing booted!! Now I need to back everything up to my 300 gig external drive as fast as possible. It might not last long.

Thanks everybody. I have a suspicion that one of the things I did last night that you guys suggested might have done the trick.

Thanks again!! :D

Sometimes if a capacitor isn't completely drained somewhere it can cause a fault. Unplug the compy then hold in the power button to drain. unplug the data and power cables from the drive(s). Plug them back in. plug back in your compy and turn on. Remember that's what fixed my raid. ;)

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me@rescam.org

I did a google search and according to the article below, there are only two programs to consider with everyone else lagging behind. It was interesting reading.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/drive-imaging-reviews.htm

That is interesting. I've been test-driving a program called NovaStor NovaBackup V. 8, and it seems pretty good to me, and the UI looks a lot like the Acronis one. I like being able to schedule backups to my NAS every night, which this backup does. And it can back up open system files, too. I kind of wonder why Acronis and Symantec are the only 2 considered? I can't really tell what they offer that NovaStor doesn't... And NovaStor offers multiple license options, which I would need (didn't check the Acronis web site, though, to see what they offer, just read what was at the end of the article). I used Ghost 2003 for a while, but I don't like that it has to reboot the computer to do the backup and verify, then boot back up into XP, but maybe that isn't how the current versions work?

Anyway, if anyone knows of any other backup programs I should check out, post a followup please!

-Dave

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