my parents recently went on vacation and when they got back, one of the hard drives on their computer went bad. the drive that went bad had xp on it and now i'm booting off the old hard drive with win98 to try and get the data off of it. i'm not sure if there is anything else i can do with it, but figured I'd check on here to see if anyone has had a similar experience and if they could offer any help.

The BIOS will detect the drive, but on boot there is a hard disk failure error (0200 error code on an old Dell). Booting to Windows gives no indication that the drive is installed, and attaching it to another computer through a ide/usb cable does not work either. I've tried some hard disk utilities and none detect the drive. My dad thinks that he got the old Chernobyl or CIH virus, since this occured over the 26th. The drive is not making any unusual noise or giving any other indication of physical damage. Any suggestions on specific programs to try, or other diagnostics tools that I could look into before sending him to Intrex or some other computer shop to try and get the data off?

7/4/2006 3:53:18 PM

knoppix live cd

7/4/2006 4:00:26 PM

thanks for the suggestion, I had thought of something like that but didn't know any specific releases off the top of my head. Unfortunetly when it starts to load, it gets to the following and freezes:

Enabling DMA acceleration for: hda [WDC WD1600JB-00EVA0]
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hdl [CD ROM Device]
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hdd [CD ROM Device]
Looking for CD in: /dev/hda _

Reset the computer, BIOS didn't recognize the drive and it booted right up. I've tried Partition magic, R-Studio, R-Linux and windows disk manager and none of them have found the drive. I think I'm just going to tell him to try somewhere else...seems to be outside my scope of help

7/4/2006 9:07:56 PM

$30 and i'll recover everything off of it...i don't recover anything, you don't have to pay anything

7/4/2006 9:19:54 PM

quagmire, I imagine what you'd do is similar to a shop, but would a place like Intrex have a better chance of recovering the data? That is the main thing they're concerned about. Looking around places are asking for at least $50 to look at the drive and another $100 or so to get the data off, so the $30 would be nice if the chance of getting the data was equal. I think that if the chance of getting the data was greater taking it somewhere they'd rather spend the money, but I have a feeling based on my limited experience with this that its pretty much an all or nothing situation. Also, they're in Greensboro, so I'd have to take the drive back with me to Raleigh and then take the data back to them on an external drive or something. I'll mention your offer and see what they say, just post if you have any more info that I can give them. Thanks

7/4/2006 10:49:10 PM

pm sent

7/4/2006 11:01:09 PM