Hard Drive crashed

RCan

New Member
new poster here..
My hard drive crashed..so I'm told. :(

I turned the PC on Sunday and it got stuck in a loop I guess. I kept getting the message "sorry for the inconvienence, but windows could not start properly....
it gave me the choices:
safe mode
safe mode with network
safe mode with command prompt
last known...
start windows normally...

No matter what I chose, right back to this screen.

so my first post questions are:
Is any data recoverable, and what would be the cost?

It's only a few photos that I want and want to know if it's worth my effort and money.


thanks in advance!
 
my hard drive has failed 2 times on me and i have had a chance to recover info, it has let me run windows and i was able to back up data. but from what you say it sounds like you cant get any data from it!

what computer do you have and is it still under warranty?
if it is you can call the helpdesk of that particular company (unless the computer is self built)
 
It's a Gateway. Out of warranty 12/04. They are the ones who told me the hard drive was done for.

I also tried booting from a cd ... no luck though
 
It sounds to me like the hard drive is done for... You can try to set it up as a "slave" in another nice person's computer to see if you can just use it for a data drive, but I doubt that will work either...
 
I also tried booting from a cd ... no luck though
why what went wrong. You should be able to boot from cd.
From this you have 2 options, you could try to boot to an os from cd and then backup files on you hard drive (if the drive will allow you to read from it)

Or install a fresh copy of the os to seperate hard dirve and once booted see if you can access the old hard drive (this is a good option because if you hdd is bust you will need a new one anyway)

Or maybe just try booting from windows cd and using the repair options.

It is not a certainty that yyou hard drive is damaged.
 
apj101 said:
why what went wrong. You should be able to boot from cd.
From this you have 2 options, you could try to boot to an os from cd and then backup files on you hard drive (if the drive will allow you to read from it)

Or install a fresh copy of the os to seperate hard dirve and once booted see if you can access the old hard drive (this is a good option because if you hdd is bust you will need a new one anyway)

Or maybe just try booting from windows cd and using the repair options.

It is not a certainty that yyou hard drive is damaged.

I tried the repair options..no luck.

I do seem to remember getting to a point that gave me the option of re-installing XP but gave me a warning that it could cause problems, so being a dummy when it comes to this,... I didn't do it.
Any tips someone could give me?

FYI..for obvious reasons I'm not typing from my home PC... I'm at work so I need some details if possible.
 
take a look at booting the system from http://www.knoppix.org/ cd, and see if you can access you hard drive - but that may be too complicated for

Or install a fresh copy of the os to seperate hard dirve and once booted see if you can access the old hard drive (this is a good option because if you hdd is bust you will need a new one anyway)
 
Is any data recoverable, and what would be the cost?
Well is it "crashed" because "you dont know and it just kinda happened" or because "you dropped the harddrive on the floor"? (etc). If its the former than it's probably not too hard

I tried the repair options..no luck.
Well can u get access to the repair console? :) From that [dos prompt] you can copy stuff around :)
 
It just kinda happened...

I went through a "drivers" cd and that took me to a D:\dos prompt. Then I ran a Gateway scan and that gave a big red *** FAILED***

Will I be able to copy whats on the C drive from there?
 
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