Is all hope lost?

NiftyDigits

fordmanchester wrote: »

NiftyDigits... You asked what controller mode is set in the BIOS. My BIOS screen doesn't look much like yours, and I've searched all through it. The closest thing I can find is a part where it says the SATA 1 drive has an Access Mode set to "Auto". (The alternative choice of Mode is "Large".)

The Motherboard is an Asus P5N E SLI

When I try to boot using the Windows XP disk, I get to the point where it says "Press any key to boot from CD". At that point, if I DON'T press anything really quickly then the original error message "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart" appears, and I'm back to square one. If I DO press a key quickly then I see "Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" flash up for a moment, before the screen turns black and hangs like that indefinitely.

Exo... I have to be honest and say that I don't feel confident delving into the hardware of my PC.

What about the Easy Recovery disc? At what point does that fail?
You may need to inspect the hardware. It's really not a big issue. To check the connections. Remove, clean and to replace RAM etc

Exo

ROY47 wrote: »

Sorry to hijack this

Is this EXO from ye olde computeractive forums ??
I was linesman !
Sorry if I'm wrong .

Hi ROY47 alias linesman

No, you are not wrong, you have me banged to rights. Nice to hear from you linesman.
I'll send you a PM in due course.

exo

Apologies to all for going off topic.

fordmanchester

Oh sorry, I misunderstood you. The "Easy Recovery" disc loaded properly and offered me a menu of 6 or 7 options such as repair, system restore, backup files etc. But when I tried to enter each option and select my hard drive, it said that the hard drive was an "unmountable volume" which was corrupted and couldn't be accessed or repaired.

Exo

fordmanchester wrote: »

Exo... I have to be honest and say that I don't feel confident delving into the hardware of my PC.

No problem.

My best guess is still a corrupt partition table or boot.ini on your hard drive.
Both are repairable but I would hesitate to use partition recovery software without trying to copy data from your hard drive first as it may be at risk of being lost.
99% of the time it will work okay but I don't want you to be the 1% at my request.

NiftyDigits

I think that you should get a new CMOS battery and perhaps clear CMOS. I would also update the BIOS.

The manual contains the relevant instructions.

If you want to save money, you need to troubleshoot step by step.

kwikbreaks

Today's Giveaway of the Day is MiniTool Power Data Recovery Boot Disk 6.8 which will create either a CD or USB bootable recovery toolkit.

The ISO is only 60k so it should work with just about any old USB thumb drive.

I've not used this but their partition manager tools are good.

Worth anybody downloading imo to add to their recovery arsenal.

This particular download is today only - 9 Dec 2014 (due to time differences will be ok until early hours of 10th) http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ There's alway something free but a lot of the stuff is mediocre

ROY47

Exo wrote: »

Hi ROY47 alias linesman

No, you are not wrong, you have me banged to rights. Nice to hear from you linesman.
I'll send you a PM in due course.

exo

Apologies to all for going off topic.

pm sent to you

[Deleted User]

fordmanchester wrote: »

When I tried to boot from the Windows CD, I pressed any key as per the instructions which appeared on the screen, but then got the original "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl + Alt + Del" message back again.

Are you sure you tried to boot from the CD?

According to post 8

fordmanchester wrote: »

F8 brings up a Boot Menu and when I select "hard disk", the same "A disk read error occurred..." message appears and I'm back to square one again.

You don't want to choose "Hard Disk". You want to choose "CD Drive".

debitcardmayhem

Hi Fordmanchester , firstly my apologies for getting your name confused (why I chose MrRochester is beyond me), I may be able to help, but given that the only useful external media you have available appears to be USB sticks I would like to know -
1) approximately how much personal data you want to recover (given your HDD seems to be 250GB)

2) Are the files you wish to recover are of certain types e.g. : .doc .jpg .wma etc

3) How big is your largest free USB stick , and how may have you got

Photorec can recover files from the HDD by type , and you may then copy those to the next door PC , and then recover the next types. Testdisk "may" possibly be able to re-enable your HDD partitions but I would prefer to see if we can recover your personal data first, since this is a recovery via forum.

In an ideal world it would be easier to use another disk with at least enough free space to do the recovery, but it may be possible without.

fordmanchester

Hi

I just wanted to thank everyone who tried to help me with this issue last week.

I'm sorry that I stopped replying, but the other desktop I was using to access this site & follow your advice was no longer available to me.

Unfortunately I ended up paying someone to attempt a repair. They tried to recover my files from the HDD but the operating system was corrupted and all data was unrecoverable. They also replaced the CMOS battery and cleaned out all the dust from inside of the tower. It cost me £58 I didn't have, but was a valuable lesson in remembering to keep my files backed up regularly.

Thanks again everyone.