Hard Disk Recovery Help

[sknowles]

Hi --

My hard drive recently died (Dell Inspirion 4000 - Windows ME) and according to Dell tech support it's not coming back (getting Hard Drive Failure I/O error message).

I've admitted defeat, but was hoping to recover some files from the hard drive. I don't need to recover everything, but was hoping to get a few files back. Also don't want to spend big bucks to get the files.

Is there anyway I can recover any files through DOS? Windows is unable to load.

Not very tech saavy, so the more detail, the better.

Thanks!
Scott

[osprey4]

Welcome to TechIMO!

Sorry to hear about you har drive. My stepmother owns that same model, but it's been fine.

Ok, Wondows won't load but can you boot using a floppy disk into DOS? If so, are you able to access the drive?

[sknowles]

Thanks for the welcome.

Yes, I can access DOS through the back up CD ROM -- Not sure, but I may have been able to access it without -- if that's even possible?

How would I go about determining if I can access the drive?

[osprey4]

Boot using either a floppy or the CD. This will get you to prompt of either the A: drive or the D: or E: drive (depending on whether the startup files specify a RAMDrive).

Then just try switching to drive C: (by typing "C:" without the quotation marks). Then try to get a directory (by typing "DIR" without the quotation marks). From there, you'll have to navigate manually to the appropriate directory where the files are. Keep in mind, you'll lose whatever long file names you had. They'll be truncated to the old 8.3 DOS file name.

[sknowles]

okay, gave that a whirl. Now I'm getting an error message:

"Data error reading drive C
Abort, Retry, Fail?"

I tried Retry without any luck.

Any other ideas?

Thanks.

[osprey4]

No, drive must be dead dead.

Hope it wasn't anything really important. Data recovery from dead drives usually runs in the hundreds of dollars.

[Atomic Rooster]

I thought I heard somehting in the way of freazing a dead or nearly dead HDD to be able to get some data off it?

[i c roYal]

that doesn't mean the drive is dead. He's probably got his drive formatted in ntfs. You can run the system recovery utility, by instering your win2k/xp cdrom (make sure that the cdrom drive is before the hard drive in bios), go into setup, choose "REPAIR" not INSTALL, and you can launch the system recovery utility from there. IF anything, there are data recovery programs you can use such as easyrecovery pro. Good luck.

[MDS]

first off do you hear the drive spin up as you start the computer? If it doesn't even spin up you are as they say SOL. Also even if it is NTFS you can type c: at the prompt and it should change if it doesn't then it may be toast but I doubt it is NTFS since he said he is running winME. Does the bios show the drive correctly?

Originally posted by MDS
Also even if it is NTFS you can type c: at the prompt and it should change

Not if he booted to DOS. DOS cannot read NTFS partitions, so it won't even show a partition on the drive at all.

Unlikley to be NTFS if it was winME, though, as you pointed out.

You can also try a disk diagnostics floppy, available free from Ontrack for downloading here. It will tell you if the drive can be physically accessed or not. Make sure the drive is set up and recognised in BIOS first, as suggested, though.

Cheers
Mick