G'day All,
I'm having a hard drive problem. My hard drive crashed I've bought a new one have loaded up windows xp pro tried connected my old drive (making a clunking noise) as a slave drive and my computer just hangs at the XP pro openning window and does not advance. If I disconnect the slave win XP opens up correctly. I can't then connect when I'm in windows as it doesn't recognise that I've connected the drive.

I'm trying to recover some data on the old drive.

Any suggestions/help would be appreciated? Thanks in advance.

Make sure that the jumper on the back of the drive are set to slave. It sounds as if the system is trying to boot from both of them.

Yes checked that it's set as a slave - and it does appear that it's trying to boot from both

Have you tried to put the drive on another ide/sata cable as either master or slave? Also check in the bios to see what drive is shown as master and slave. I think that you said that there is a clicking sound from the crashed hard drive if so I'd bet that you won't be able to get the data off it. In what I have seen if the drive is making clicking noises then it is shot ussally not a good sign but I have been wrong a lot and I hope that I am in this case.

When I go to BIOS I see both drives and same on boot but just hangs and doesn't go anywhere. I've heard freezing may help. Any suggestions?

Hi,
The clinking or clunking noise means the heads inside the hard drive are probably shot.
My suggestion is to take the hard drive to a computer sales/repair store near you, ask them about recovering any data for you.
Also, ask what it would cost, if they can recover it.
Best wishes,
fredg

Another source for data recovery is Ontrack.com. But they can be very expensive. I doubt if its trying to boot from both. But your system may be trying to read something from that drive during boot and since its so damaged that could cause the hang.

This is why people do backups, so they are secured in the case of crashes.

Thanks Scott. I'll take on board what you've said.

I've heard that freezing the hard drive helps to recover data in some situations. Does anyone know if this would help in this situation?

Its worth a shot. Stick it in the freezer for 24 hours. (put it in a baggie, don't let it get wet) The see if it works. Get your files off quick.

Here is the way I did it:
I had the Same problem with my 250 GB drive. A clicking noise and windows wouldn't boot with it hooked up. (Actually if you wait loooong enough you can usually get in.) When I hooked the drive up as slave to another computer it would boot windows but if I tried to use explorer to access the drive it would freeze and make more clicking. Because I was able to boot this other computer though I was able to use this (http://www.r-studio.com/#rstudio_NTFS) software to recover my files. It took 2 weeks for the software to work because of so many read errors. (I should have set ti not to retry each failure 10 times. If I set it to once it would have probably only taken me a day.)

But here is what you do. To make sure it works before you buy it. Download the demo for the one you are interested in. Figure out how it works first. Then use it to image the drive. Do not attempt to recover any files yet. Get the image. It can then recover files from the image. The idea here is to use the drive as little as possible. If you don't make the image first you end up using the drive twice as much. First time to do a full scan, second time to recover what you want. With the image you can use the demo to see if there is anything recoverable on the image. It will only let you recover 64K but this should help you decide if its worth $50. I know a local computer shop if going to charge you more than that to put a screwdriver to your case and they don't use tools this advanced.

Good luck. It worked for me. You can read a little about my experiences at missingbit.com (http://www.missingbit.com/Default.aspx?tabid=68).

Good luck and I really hope you get your files back, I've been there.

Yeah I was going to say something about that earlier before but had to go. Yeah freezing it in a baggy of sorts that seals tight!! Now will give you sometime to get some of it off. Of course you can also swap with another drive of the same size bla bla bla the platters as well.

Hi,


It may happen your partitions are corrupted on the drive so Windows can not operate them. You can then try Active@ partition recovery tool to restore partitions, as this tool really helped me before in such a situation.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/