Macroware Technology
Computer hard drive crash
posted Sunday, 18 June 2006
My hard drive crashed the other day on my home computer. Here are some details about the circumstances, and what I tried to recover the data.
Brief summary of my computer system
It is a Pentium 4 2.x GHz Gateway 2000 computer purchased some time in 2001 or 2002. It was running Windows XP. The hard drive is 80 GB IDE. The machine has 512 MB of SDRAM.
Brief summary of what happened
While working on the computer, Windows froze for several seconds. Then a blue screen appeared saying that some sort of fatal error had occurred. I turned off the computer. When I turned it back on it said that it could not read the drive and to press control-alt-delete to try again. Of course after pressing that the same error came up.
Brief summary of what I tried
First I tried the Windows setup CD that came with this Gateway computer. There were two choices, one to reinstall Windows, and the other to go to some command recovery prompt. I only tried the command recovery prompt. I tried a couple of the commands for rewriting the master boot record. Those seemed to work. I also tried CHKDSK and that failed saying there was something fatally wrong with the hard drive. I was never able to get the DIR command to display files on the hard drive.
Next I removed the hard drive from the computer and installed it as a slave in a second computer running Windows XP (Compaq Presario). The machine recognized the drive and assigned it a drive letter. A couple of times during the BIOS initialization there was a warning stating that the drive was damaged and that it should be backed up immediately. When I tried to look at the drive in Windows explorer there was nothing there. I noticed in the disk manager in Windows XP (right click on My Computer and select "manage") that the drive did have a partition but did not have a file system. I purchased Search and Recover 3 software by iolo Technologies. It was not able to find anything on the drive because it did not have a file system. So at that point I deleted the partition on the drive, created a new one, and quick formatted it with an NTFS file system. The search and recover software would at least try to scan the drive, but it always got to a certain point and errored out saying that a CRC error occurred at sector 12288 and that it could not proceed.
I expect that most of the actual data is still on the drive, and is recoverable if it is not in damaged sectors.
One additional thing that I did try, that may have erased some of the underlying data was that after I got the CRC error I tried running CHKDSK with the repair bad sectors option turned on. I think, that this might try writing to and reading from all empty space to test it thus destroying data that might be there. I realized that and quickly cancelled the command (it was less than 1% complete).
The biggest data loss is of pictures from Easter and my kids third birthday which were put on the hard drive since the last backup in February. One positive is that the iolo Search and Recovery 3 program was able to recover 10 of the deleted birthday pictures from the SD card of the camera they were taken on. So the program was not a total waste of money. I'm still missing quite a few birthday pictures and all of the Easter pictures. I have given the hard drive to a local computer company to try to recover. If that doesn't work, I may investigate a data recovery service, but based on what I've heard, this probably won't be cost effective.
Brief summary of my computer system
It is a Pentium 4 2.x GHz Gateway 2000 computer purchased some time in 2001 or 2002. It was running Windows XP. The hard drive is 80 GB IDE. The machine has 512 MB of SDRAM.
Brief summary of what happened
While working on the computer, Windows froze for several seconds. Then a blue screen appeared saying that some sort of fatal error had occurred. I turned off the computer. When I turned it back on it said that it could not read the drive and to press control-alt-delete to try again. Of course after pressing that the same error came up.
Brief summary of what I tried
First I tried the Windows setup CD that came with this Gateway computer. There were two choices, one to reinstall Windows, and the other to go to some command recovery prompt. I only tried the command recovery prompt. I tried a couple of the commands for rewriting the master boot record. Those seemed to work. I also tried CHKDSK and that failed saying there was something fatally wrong with the hard drive. I was never able to get the DIR command to display files on the hard drive.
Next I removed the hard drive from the computer and installed it as a slave in a second computer running Windows XP (Compaq Presario). The machine recognized the drive and assigned it a drive letter. A couple of times during the BIOS initialization there was a warning stating that the drive was damaged and that it should be backed up immediately. When I tried to look at the drive in Windows explorer there was nothing there. I noticed in the disk manager in Windows XP (right click on My Computer and select "manage") that the drive did have a partition but did not have a file system. I purchased Search and Recover 3 software by iolo Technologies. It was not able to find anything on the drive because it did not have a file system. So at that point I deleted the partition on the drive, created a new one, and quick formatted it with an NTFS file system. The search and recover software would at least try to scan the drive, but it always got to a certain point and errored out saying that a CRC error occurred at sector 12288 and that it could not proceed.
I expect that most of the actual data is still on the drive, and is recoverable if it is not in damaged sectors.
One additional thing that I did try, that may have erased some of the underlying data was that after I got the CRC error I tried running CHKDSK with the repair bad sectors option turned on. I think, that this might try writing to and reading from all empty space to test it thus destroying data that might be there. I realized that and quickly cancelled the command (it was less than 1% complete).
The biggest data loss is of pictures from Easter and my kids third birthday which were put on the hard drive since the last backup in February. One positive is that the iolo Search and Recovery 3 program was able to recover 10 of the deleted birthday pictures from the SD card of the camera they were taken on. So the program was not a total waste of money. I'm still missing quite a few birthday pictures and all of the Easter pictures. I have given the hard drive to a local computer company to try to recover. If that doesn't work, I may investigate a data recovery service, but based on what I've heard, this probably won't be cost effective.
comments