I’ve got a laptop from a collegue at work which crashed all of a sudden, and when I tried to reboot I got an error saying: disk read error, press ctrl+alt+del to restart. Obv the reboots give the same errormessage.
So I tried to recover the data and get rid of the harddrive. I bought a König IDE to USB-adapter and connect the laptop harddrive to the adapter. It’s a Seagate Momentus 40GB harddrive.
When I connect to my new laptop, I see the hdd as an external drive (as it should be!) but I can’t click on it, nor rightclick. Screen freezes and I can only shut it off with task management or disconnect the usbcable…
There is some important data on it, so restoring the data has priority!
Tried booting with Activedisk, no avail, tried Recuva software, also no avail, so starting to get pretty desperate…
Take the drive to a specialist data recovery company. The drive obviously is dead, the more you mess with it the greater the chance the data will be damaged.
Have you tried all the options you’ve got from windows recovery environment?
Try to boot while pressing F8, and you’ll get quite a few options to repair the disk, you may also wanna try to boot from the windows dvd and try to do a repair from here. I have many times needed to boot from the cd/dvd to do a repair, when the filesystem has been damaged.
it can be just a file error for the bootsector, if so then windows provide you with all the tools you need - same if it is some bad sectors among other things…
Has it made any unusual noises since it stopped working? Have any SMART messages been displayed recently when booting (especially before the drive stopped working)?
I’m with logic_earth on this. If the contents of the drive are important enough to you that you’ll pay a high price to get the data back, quit messing with the drive and take it to a data recovery firm that has the specialized equipment to save your data.
I think best is to ditch the hard disk… Everything I tried failed… Every program, even putting it in the freezer. Asked what it costs to recover data at a special company: Over 1300 euros (± 1600$) :o lol…
Thats not good but in most cases you don’t need another program here
Have you tried the recovery console and a simple chkdsk /r or chkdsk /p /r ? this will fix errors, find bad sectors/clusters and try to restore readable information - but of course if the disk is dead, there is not much to do… if the recovery console is not installed, you can access it from booting up into the windows dvd
If you get the disk readable in some sort of way, you could then use Getdataback from runtime software to try to recover the data - I’ve been using this for years now
Tried that aswell… Problem is: Even chkdsk freezes and doesn’t execute… Even magnetic-like software (that doesn’t use the writing arm of the disk(if that would be broken)) does not work… So no Windows DVD startup aswell.
Think we can shut it down here
if you tried chkdsk from the recovery console and not just from the commans line, and also tried fixboot and fixmbr, the disk is probably dead, and life moves on - so annoying when this kind of things happend, and you don’t have a fresh backup
If everything failes and you have given up on it, I would try to format it or remove the partition, and then try to hook it up to another pc and try to recover the data with Getdataback - I have done this quite some times and managed to recover sensitive data - if the disk is to be ditched anyway there is nothing to lose
It does sound pretty hopeless, but you could try booting the machine from a Linux “Live” CD. Various flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, allow you to run the system from the CD without having to install anything. If you can do that, you can try to mount the Windows drive from within Linux and recover your data that way.
Nope also no avail… I’ve put already so much time in it, that I could remake the documents myself :-)…
I think the hard drive is more then broken, and the entire laptop has done its time aswell, so not that a great loss, apart from the documents offcourse!
I don’t think it’s an OS problem because it looks like it’s failing during POST before the OS is even started. Much more likely to be a hardware or BIOS problem.
Check your bios read hard drive.
If you can see your HDD in BIOS setup first boot your HDD
IF your HDD is OK and still you can not boot run live ubuntu dvd and beckup your files.
WIsh you luck
but in most cases you don’t need another program here
