Lordjj

Hi guys, I have a dead hard drive; it says "Non-system disk or disk error ...Boot Failure". I think that happened after I handled the Hard disk, since I might have touched its components upon removal and replacement, so there might have been electrostatic discharge. Everything is plugged in correctly -I checked and rechecked. I had nothing backed up. My question is can I extract the files on it? (I heard of something called RAID, can I use it at this point? Or is there any other possible way to get that Data?) I've had a disk do that to me before; when I reFormatted it it worked again -but I need the Data.
-Please Help, JJ

johnb35

Raid is not what you think it is. What you need to do, is slave your hard drive in another system and see if the drive is accessible, if so, then you can copy your data over.

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linkin93

If the drive is completely dead, ie: wont spin up (seazed bearing) then you can take the data plate out and put it into another of the same model and voila, your data is accessible.

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Jamin43

I'd try setting up the Disk as a Slave Drive first. Probably your best bet - if the disk is readable. If it is - you can use it as a data file and drag your data onto the disk you are booting off of. Once you've retreived ( backed up ) the data on your old drive, you can wipe the drive with boot failure clear. Then reformat / re-install your O/S - set the drive back to master - and drag the files from your backup drive to your newly reformatted drive.

If you reformat your drive before retreiving your data - it'll be lost for the most part - outside of paying some large amount of money for sophisticated Drive recovery specialist.

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Lordjj

Ok, here's the latest: I connected the working Hard drive to the end of the cable as I was told and set it to Master, and then connected the non-working one to the middle of the cable and set it to Slave, so it appeared as Local Disk(E: ), except it seems totally whacked: First of all it contains a bunch of files (Hundred or so) whose names are weird symbols and whose sizes are all about 36KB, and that are not openable (if I try to open them with Notepad for example, it says the file doesn't exist), and Second the properties of Local Disk(E: ) say that its only 1.25GB in capacity and that 559MB are used up, but actually its a 20GB disk. I'm sure that (E: ) is the old hard drive since if I unplug it, (E: ) disappears. What can I do to get the original data? Is there any program I can use?

tremmor

ive never used it but Gibson Spinrite might do it. its not free.
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm