There was one on TV.... It's on QVC.

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"Scilence you sympithant oath! You are hired for your personal skill."
Stiner Corp.
MW4 Mercs

Do you know what it was called?

Xeno, if it has (or had until it died) a DOS FAT partition, and if the BIOS still recognises the HDD is there, u might try booting from a DOS floppy and using a Rebuild command switch in Norton Disk Doctor (DOS) which will restart the partition and restore the data, although it will put it into numbered dir's, it should get it all back just not where you left it! i do this a couple of times a week as hard drives get screwed up and it generally works well.

however if u are using NTFS things are a bit different. I will look into this for you today at work, seeing as u helped me with my Linksys router.

(if the drive can no longer even be detected by the BIOS then u r going nowhere I'm afraid, professional data retrieval costs thousands and even then doesnt always work)

actually Taw you might be able to answer me a question - I'm a bit ignorant about these things so bare with me! - I was always given the impression that NTFS is more stable than FAT32, so I've always formatted into it, but recently I'm coming across more and more FAT formatted drives, is there a reason why FAT might be better? I don't know if I'm opening a can of worms here or not

well now this is something of an issue for me at the moment. NTFS doesn't fragment anything like as much and on NT/2K systems u can take security and sharing down to file level, unlike FAT32 which is dir. level, and of course by default the 32-bit MS os create NTFS partitions. y on the whole it is more stable, and for most networks NTFS is standard, FAT is dead. BUT.. I have noticed a lot of NTFS drives coming back with file and dir errors from XP machines, which when I FAT32 them and put XP back on, they're fine. wtf? I'm looking into it now on the MS Knowledge base.

btw FAT is easier to repair, and u can usually fix it from a boot disk, which of course u can't with NTFS unless u use the recovery console which is no place for u if u aren't confident of what u r doing. if in doubt use FAT.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 18-10-2003 15:10:20

hmmm let me know what you find out because I'm about to set up a system for my dad with XP, and I'd rather get it right first time if ya know what i mean...

if in doubt FAT32 it, then install Diskeeper to keep fragmentation to a minimum, if it's a home pc then NTFS is neither here nor there, unless u have non-FAT volumes in the machine already.

@Xeno, if this disk can still be detected by the BIOS have u tried just slaving it and scandisk/chkdsk-ing it as a slave? how corrupted is it, do u know?

..you think you're done with the past, but the past isn't done with you..

Okay, The HDD can be read from BIOS. Or atleast recognised. But when i try using the manage function in the right click of "My Computer" then select Storage, then Disk Management, it shows that my Backup drive does not have a file system. And if i have the HDD installed in my computer, the computer runs so slow.... I don't get it. I think i might have gotten a rotten worm

well if it can be seen by the BIOS u have a chance!

if u can't actually read/write to the old drive even though you can see it then the file structure has been f*kt (this happens, my finance director had the same happen last week and it took me 2 days to rebuild the drive) then with the drive slaved onto the secondary cable and a new drive as primary master, so that its apparently fonk transfer rate, run chkdsk on the drive at boot. if that doesn't work boot from ur XP cd and use F2 recovery console, it might let u restore the file structure (or not but by this time ur running out of options) btw with the drive slaved, do the obvious like a virus check if u haven't done already, although with no apparent file system it prob will do nothing. the fact that u are getting slow performance out of the pc with this drive in suggests that the drive is physically knackered, what make and model is it? sometimes HD manufacturers have repair and recovery utilities ontheir websites (use with caution)

i'll repost with a definitive answer later because i have a drive with much the same issues that i'm going to experiment on today, because i'm p*st off with this happening with XP (presumably ur using XP and not NT/W2K)

btw Xeno u didnt say if its FAT32 or NTFS, if it's FAT32 I have an easy-ish way of fixing ur problem (it will work I promise, if u do exactly what i tell u) if its NTFS try the above then get back to me (u won't do any harm if it doesn't, unless u repartition the drive by mistake - don't do that!) but once (and IF) we recover your data, u'd better chuck this drive. it won't play again.




Edited by - Tawakalna on 18-10-2003 14:35:17

Edited by - Tawakalna on 18-10-2003 15:07:50

Maxtor 40 GB, 5400RPMs
File System: Not sure... Belive it may have been Fat32
OS: XP- But I don't have an actual XP disk, because of backup images.

Thanks for all of your help!

What I had on that drive includes:

1Gb + of music that I don't want to risk re-downloading
15Gb+ of Downloads/ Programs that I have forgotten about that are really cool to have.

And some other stuff i cant remember.

Even with DSL, that will take a long time to re-download.

oh dear Maxtor 40gb, how did I know u were going to say that? the failure rate on these is enormous, i have thrown 6 away this week. i'm not feeling optimistic now, but we'll give it a go.

we might have a chance to rebuild the drive seeing as its FAT. do you have a copy of Norton Utilities? it doesn't matter that its for DOS/W98, thats actually why we need it. if u have the Nu cd, just use that, u don't need to install it.

make a w98 bootdisk on a floppy. put NU cd in drive and boot PC from floppy, maing sure you have real-mode cd rom support. change dir to ur cd's NU dir. type ndd /? for syntax help, then type in ndd c: /c /rebuild (or whatever depending upon your version AND of course presuming the cr*p drive is still drive c This command will start Norton Disk Doctor running a partition and file structure rebuild and to run all disk doctor tests including surface verify.

OK, the first thing that u should see once it starts examining is a "primary DOS partition found, do you wish to restart this partition" to which u say "yes" (ignore the UNDO disk warning, never works anyway) u will then wait expectantly and it will eventually tell u that the partition has been reactivated. the disk doctor will then want to continue with its tests, let it auto-repair evrything, u might have to hang around for a while just telling it to do stuff, say yes to everything it wants to repair. if it seems to not be doing anything, but ur hdd activity LED is still busy, DONT FOR F**** SAKE stop the PC, this can take ages!

when it's done u will have to reboot, again reboot from the floppy, then change drive to C: and u should see a load of numbered directories and ._dd files. if u do then u've done it, u can slam another HDD in as pri master, partition and format it, put an OS on, then with the old drivslaved u can copy the data from the numbered dirs and files (because it will still be there) Once u r satisfied uv got as much of as u can (u will probably lose the odd file or two) then chuck the old drive away, u will never be able to use it again. was it a 63E0L0 or an N40P? all total cr*p, i'm chucking em away by the barrow load.

if u don't have a copy of ndd or u want more help, then e-mail me (taking DIESPAMDIE out of my email address) and i will gladly assist u.

btw: ur going to have to get a new drive and an OS from somewhere. u'll prob never be able to use this drive again reliably so go and get another one.


..you think you're done with the past, but the past isn't done with you..

Edited by - Tawakalna on 19-10-2003 16:01:37

Okay, I did what you said, but it did it on my PRIMARY HDD, the one that is working. Not my secondary... Spent 3 hours reloading my OS.

But I did get the program to run, but am not sure if it is working yet. I still need to re-plug in the HDD because it just slows down my computer too much to have it in. Don't know why. I have Norton System Works 2002 BTW and it had ndd on it so i used it there. Don't know if it would have helped to have a newer version of norton though. I will get back when I plug in the HDD to test it. It didn't work last time... So many errors about clusters. 114000+ I believe, stoped it there.

Thank you very much for your help!

Ehrrm from the opinion of a tired PC builder (Thats my Job) NTFS and FAT32 and FAT now Being tired if i can remember Right go for NTFS Because with NTFS say you save a file of 26 Kbyts it will be saved to the Disk on a 30 Kbyts Memory Cluster However on FAT and FAT32 say you take the same 26 Kbyt file and save it will be saved to about a 3 meg Memory Cluster just think of the waste of space

ok Xeno, sounds like we are getting somewhere. I did SAY to make sure that the fonk drive was set as primary mstr for these purposes, but never mind now.

stick with it, restart the partition if u haven't already done so then leave NDD (in DOS from bootdisk) repairing and u WILL get something back, despite the bad clusters. the bad clusters are a big factor in slowing the drive down as the heads are having trouble reading the surface of the disk thus chogging data transfer rates.

ok AoD u r right, NTFS is a more compact and efficient file system but for the purpose of rescuing Xeno's disk he needs to keep FAT32 for now. btw it's my job too!


..you think you're done with the past, but the past isn't done with you..





Edited by - Tawakalna on 20-10-2003 20:25:04