Ok, some friends have given me a seagate 120gb SATA hard drive that has developed bad sectors. There seems to be alot of physical damage to the drive, to the point of when it powers down there are noises that it shouldn't make.

All I want is to get it to the point where I can atleast boot the computer with that hdd running so that I can retrieve the files that they have on there.


I've tried it on 3 computers so far all with onboard SATA. windows will not boot with the damaged drive installed, even in safe or diagnostic mode, it just hangs on exactly the same file.

After that, gave it a shot running the SATA drive on a card with
a comp that runs windows off an IDE drive, same deal, it still crashes loading windows.

giving up on windows totally, I tried just getting it to boot from a win98 start up floppy, all drives unplugged the floppy loads. Plug in any other drive the floppy loads, plug in this drive the boot disk hangs and won't load. tried out different boot disks, no luck.

is there anything left to try?

if its critical stuff i'd just take it to one of them hard drive recovery joints

try an external drive caddy, since it'll just be accessed via USB and may not be prone to the same issue

Linux Live CD, Knoppix or Ubuntu, give it a go.

try an external drive caddy, since it'll just be accessed via USB and may not be prone to the same issue

Oh yeah?!?! How about YOU try an external drive!

Mantra who are you talking to??

Mantra who are you talking to??

I believe Jim's response. A+ for reading.

Its SATA so you can hot start it from in windows and see how long it lasts. No need to boot with it plugged in.

If it is physically seizing then I have heard some people have had some success with freezing the drive (in the freezer, in a zip lock bag with minimum air in it) for a few hours, then plugging it in and copying as much as they can. Try that at your own risk :)

I though Jim's suggestion was a good one?

Could try a HDD regen, theres a nice CD full of handy tech tools diamond boot cd google should reveal some sources for you. Program will be on there and I have seen it rescue several drives back to a bootable condition.

Alternatively you could try ghosting the HDD to another with forced cloning enabled and ignore bad sectors enabled, then see if it boots otherwise you could try a regen on that.

stellar phoenix. not free but freaken awesome even if the file tables have been nuked. it reads the physical sectors on the disk if they're still readable.

R-Studio. Seriously. Buy this software, it will save your life. The number of times it has saved my ass and the asses of friends and family. http://www.r-studio.com/

It has a trial so you can see what you can recover.

Oh yeah?!?! How about YOU try an external drive!

c*** c*** c*** c*** c*** c*** c*** c*** c***!!!!!

haha mantra and boxhead