Will Rickards
Storage Is My Life
I have a data recovery situation on my hands and need some advice.
So my uncle's PC blue screened with unmountable boot volume.
I figure no problem the mbr is probably hosed or something run the recovery console and do fixmbr. Only the hard drive is SATA and hooked up to an intel raid controller. So window xp sp2 install disk can't even see the drive. ANd there is no floppy on this machine to supply the drivers at boot time.
So I put another IDE drive in the machine and install windows on it.
Then I reconnect the bad drive. Windows hangs on boot (yes it is booting from the added drive and not the bad one).
I try disconnecting it and then reconnecting it to power when windows is running. Then running rescan disks from disk management. Windows is semi-responsive but is really hung. I can't start new applications. And attempting to shut down is hanging.
The drive itself may be clicking but it isn't nearly as loud as other clicks of death I've heard. I think maybe it is just trying to read the MBR and partition table and failing.
So I really have no way of running fixmbr or running a chkdsk as disk management hangs with the drive installed.
So I figure I'm hurting the drive with all these reboots trying to read it. I need to switch to pure data recovery here. So I need something else to diagnose the disk and help me recover the data. Suggestions? Should I use spinrite here? Getdataback? Something else? I've never had to go this far before.
I've disconnected the bad drive till the replacement arrives and I can start data recovery.
So my uncle's PC blue screened with unmountable boot volume.
I figure no problem the mbr is probably hosed or something run the recovery console and do fixmbr. Only the hard drive is SATA and hooked up to an intel raid controller. So window xp sp2 install disk can't even see the drive. ANd there is no floppy on this machine to supply the drivers at boot time.
So I put another IDE drive in the machine and install windows on it.
Then I reconnect the bad drive. Windows hangs on boot (yes it is booting from the added drive and not the bad one).
I try disconnecting it and then reconnecting it to power when windows is running. Then running rescan disks from disk management. Windows is semi-responsive but is really hung. I can't start new applications. And attempting to shut down is hanging.
The drive itself may be clicking but it isn't nearly as loud as other clicks of death I've heard. I think maybe it is just trying to read the MBR and partition table and failing.
So I really have no way of running fixmbr or running a chkdsk as disk management hangs with the drive installed.
So I figure I'm hurting the drive with all these reboots trying to read it. I need to switch to pure data recovery here. So I need something else to diagnose the disk and help me recover the data. Suggestions? Should I use spinrite here? Getdataback? Something else? I've never had to go this far before.
I've disconnected the bad drive till the replacement arrives and I can start data recovery.
