Recover data from a bad hard drive

BLK1985

BLK1985

New Member
I was wondering if there is a way to recover data from a Hard Drive that I think is shot.

Heres the story. I had to push the power button to restart my lap top this morning because it was frooze and I could not click anything. Then I restarted it and it asked to start in safe mode which I did. It went to the XP screen then it changed to a blue screen (blue screen of death) for a split second then went back to the screen asking to start in safe mode or normal. I choose normal this time. It did the same thing.

So I decidied to try to install XP again. I did this and got to the screen where it says enter setup or repair or exit setup. I choose Enter Setup. It then went to another Blue screen and stayed there and was then frooze. I retried this a few times with same result. I also tried to just repair with the same result.

This makes me think the hard drive is shot. Is this what others think? Well the plan is to buy a new computer maybe this weekend, I just have to find out about a deal with my work about an interest free loan on computers. I just want some of the data off that hard drive. Is there any way to?

EDIT: It is a Lap Top, if that matters.
 
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If the drive is "toast" you would need to pay out for a recovery service in most cases. There are several freeware programs available for data recovey when a partition becomes inaccessible. But for a physical failure you would need to consult a professional service. If you had a usb adapter for 2 1/2" drives you could try booting from a Linux live for cd type distro for the copy from that to a drive on another system or portable.
 
If you got some data from the drive (the xp screen did load?) then you should plug it in as a slave drive, and copy all the data off. If there was no reaction from the HD then I would say it is toast.
 
Trizoy said:
If you got some data from the drive (the xp screen did load?) then you should plug it in as a slave drive, and copy all the data off. If there was no reaction from the HD then I would say it is toast.
Click to expand...

Yes the XP screen did load for about 5 seconds then it went to the blue screen again.

Does everyone else think the hard drive is shot or do you think it could be something else?
 
It sounds like something in Windows is toast. Or you simply had a bad install of either drivers for video/sound or some program. Besides a drive going bad the other most likely hardware faults can be seen with the memory installed. The blue screen usually points at some driver trying to load into reserved memory space seeing Windows lock.
 
PC eye said:
It sounds like something in Windows is toast. Or you simply had a bad install of either drivers for video/sound or some program. Besides a drive going bad the other most likely hardware faults can be seen with the memory installed. The blue screen usually points at some driver trying to load into reserved memory space seeing Windows lock.
Click to expand...

How would I check to see if any of what you say could be it? And how would I fix it? I cant even get to the log in screen, all I can get into is BIOS(besides what I mentioned before).

Also anyone else, if you dont think its a shot hard drive what do you think it could be?
 
For one are you seeing any error messages at port time like "failure to detect disk"? That can be from damage to the mbr and boot sector information since the attempt to reinstall Windows was never completed. Besides the drive itself the drive cable could be the problem. How old is the laptop?
 
Flat ribbon type cables are known to get hardened over a period of time. But being that's a laptop have you bumped it around any? If the read-write head loses the ability to float just above the disk inside the drive itself you may or may not hear a clicking sound pointing at a bad drive. When you went to try the repair option was that at the recovery console or did you try the repair install method? http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
 
I talked to a few people at work about it and we will be working with it a little bit next week.

Here is the error I get on the Blue screen stop: 0x0000000A if anyone knows what that means.
 
Most blue screen surprisingly are software related usually when a driver of some type is being loaded into a reserves memory address. But taking notes on a specific error message like this when going to install Windows points at something other then any driver or the hard drive. You may want to review the MS troubleshooting information on this type of error seen at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314063
 
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