Hard Drive Failure

April 20, 2004 6:40 PM

Yet Another Hard Drive Failure: My laptop started hanging periodically, and eventually stopped booting. Suspecting a hard drive failure, I swapped drives, and sure enough, it works fine now. Except, of course, for the old hard drive. I've put that in a USB enclosure and I've been able to recover some of the data in fits and starts. However, it continues to lock sporadically while the data is being read, and XP will occasionally drop the drive, no longer showing it in explorer. Is there a better way to recover my data, given the inability to stay connected to it via USB?

After XP drops the drive, it gives me the error: "F:\ is not accessible. The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable." If I then unplug the drive from the USB and then plug it back in, it will show up fine, or at least until the next time it hangs.

posted by monju_bosatsu to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

You might try freezing it.
posted by ajr at 6:53 PM on April 20, 2004

Response by poster: Okay, now it's giving me the "corrupted and unreadable" error every time. Bah!
posted by monju_bosatsu at 7:08 PM on April 20, 2004

I had a problem with one of my hard drives a while ago and found that Linux was actually much better at recovering the data off of an NTFS partition than Windows was, because it would handle the read errors more gracefully. Windows kept hanging up or refusing to recognize the drive, while Linux would just print some error messages (and presumably copy some corrupt data) and continue copying. I was able to recover 99%+ of my files correctly this way, when Windows would only copy a few before dying or refusing to access the drive any more. I copied the files onto a network share; I'm not sure whether this is true any longer, but the NTFS writing support in Linux used to be rather untrustworthy.
posted by m-bandy at 7:33 PM on April 20, 2004

Freezing it does help, I have several friends who have gotten data from drives in that manner (put it in a ziplock first though).
When my laptop's drive died I put it into an (open) external enclosure, put a big heatsink on it and pointed a fan at it to keep it cold whilst I retreived the data.
posted by j.edwards at 7:54 PM on April 20, 2004

I had a similar problem with my Thinkpad and while I don't know if it will help you in this case, what I did was to buy a harddrive enclosure for the old drive that went into a bay in my laptop so the laptop was connected directly to the IDE controller. I was able to get all my data off that way.
posted by EatenByAGrue at 8:54 PM on April 20, 2004

My trusty Toshiba just went through a nasty spell of HD failures. I blame AskMe for this, as several people have asked for laptop recommendations, forcing me to proclaim the Toshiba's ruggedness.

Anyway, after running CHKDSK /R a half-dozen times, it seems to have settled down. Presumably the drive has reassigned the bad sectors.

Nonetheless, I'll be purchasing a new drive this week.

My point, btw, was that chkdsk /r was the solution.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:22 AM on April 21, 2004

I had good luck with a Knoppix CD as the boot when I had to recover after a Witty Worm hosed my drive. (Damn ISS security software...bah...I got taken down less than a week after installing Black Ice.) I couldn't recover anything from windows, but was able to recover about 95% of the disk booting from knoppix and then going to the drive.

(It was an AskMe answer that got me to Knoppix originally...now I swear by it.) It's a free download and once burned to CD, is completely bootable and runnable from the CD.
posted by dejah420 at 10:38 AM on April 21, 2004

Oh...a note...I have two CD drives...so I could have one bootable and burn data to the other...I'm not sure how well disk swapping would work.
posted by dejah420 at 10:40 AM on April 21, 2004