dead pc?

thamesmatt

albertross wrote: »

I confess, I'm a bit lost, as to what is plugged in where, and what you have done

Do you have a laptop with internet connectivity that boots into windows? Is the caddy plugged into that? If so, download the utilities, and run it on the caddy drive.

sorry, i am rambling a bit basically.

I have an old old laptop with a wifi dongle thing pluged in which I have access to the internet and a usb port to copy things onto a memory stick but no cd writer. a have an old floppy drive but havent had a floppy disk for years!

My pc I took apart this morning and the knackered drive is in a caddy plugged into the USB port now and seems to behave no differently in there or not.

when I plug the caddy into the laptop it tells me I need to reformat the disk. it used to say it was corrupted and couldnt access it but thats changed for some reason.

perhaps my best bet is to run one of these file recovery things while plugged into the laptop.

doh! I think I have just realised i'm being an idiot trying to do it on the pc!

I'm no techyy but I have have learned an awful lot thanks to you lot and (someone on the leeds united email list)

so next step is try the recovery when plugged into the laptop?

matt

albertross_2

yeah, try it, it might not work, but worth a try, whatever you do, don't format it.

Before you go paying for recovery or recovery software, report back what happens (there may be free or cheap alternatives). The good news is that it appears to be spinning.

One possibility is spinrite, around £40, but there is no guarantee it will fix the problem, so could be wasted money. The disk manufacturers usually have a free drive fitness test util on their website, but you would need some sort of cd burner to create a boot floppy to run it.

thamesmatt

am using a demo version of getbackdata for ntfs to try and recover data

is it usual for it to claim to take around 20 hours for a 160gb hard drive. am using it in my old laptop with the knackered drive in the caddy

albertross_2

it could take a while, especially if the laptop has a usb 1/1.1 interface.

thamesmatt

oh yes! it will be USB 1.1 the laptop is 6 years old.

Looks like it will be finished about 4am now! I assume being the demo version it wont rescue it all then only let me get so many files back unless I upgrade?

cslogg

thamesmatt,
I had exactly the same problem only last week and I am afriad to say I lost everything on my PC.I called in a nice young man at £35 an hour and he had all the recovery discs and most of the sofware mentioned in this thread but according to him (and I was watching over his shoulder) none of the progs could even see my hard drive.He offered to send it away to a specialist data recovery firm but it would cost me around £450.In the end I installed a new drive and reinstalled XP.I now have a PC with very little data on it at the moment.

cslogg

thamesmatt

cslogg wrote: »

thamesmatt,
I had exactly the same problem only last week and I am afriad to say I lost everything on my PC.I called in a nice young man at £35 an hour and he had all the recovery discs and most of the sofware mentioned in this thread but according to him (and I was watching over his shoulder) none of the progs could even see my hard drive.He offered to send it away to a specialist data recovery firm but it would cost me around £450.In the end I installed a new drive and reinstalled XP.I now have a PC with very little data on it at the moment.

cslogg

not quite ready to give up yet. I have a file recovery program that has recognised it and is doing something and has been for hours via a usb1.1 (yawn). The files are there it seems to see it but what the heck happens when its finished I dont know. Might work might not but I have to do what I can to save my photos!

I have now invested in a new laptop! no more desk tops for me (this is miles more powerful and alf the price! so at last I can burn CDs so I can try th rescue disk