Recommendations on a data recovery service..??

[leoblob]

The hard drive in my wife's (desktop) computer just bit the dust. I removed it, put it in another computer as D, tried running scandisk, got an error that the FAT was corrupted & it couldn't proceed, tried other things... no luck. Now, I can't see the drive from a (true) DOS prompt, but the BIOS sees the drive (but gives an error message during boot). Now, scandisk won't even start up.

I just want the data from one directory. Any suggestions on who/where to have this done? Also, should I worry about the few passwords which are on the drive, in other directories (for internet access, etc.)

Drive is a 30GB Western Digital, formatted as FAT32, with WIN98SE. Or is there still some hope I can read this drive myself?

Thanks.

[dsvochak]

Take a look at this page from the Absolute Raleigh site:

http://www.absoluteraleigh.com/services ... overy.html

If they can do it in house, you're not going to beat the price. If not, OnTrack has been around for a long time. Their price, however, appears to have gone up a whole lot since the mid 1980's. The question will then become how much (in $) do you really need the data?

[leoblob]

I GOT IT!!

Through trial-and-error I came up with this: Put bad drive on primary IDE channel as "master." Set drive jumpers to "single." Boot from WIN98SE boot floppy into DOS. Now, I can see the files on the bad hard drive from the A: prompt. (Any other combination of settings rendered the bad drive as unreadable.)

Load DOS drivers for parallel-port ZIP from floppy. From the A: prompt, Use DOS 'copy' command to copy files from bad drive to the ZIP. Done! All the file names were truncated to 8 characters, but that's OK. So, I'm pleased... almost as pleased as if I had done regular backups of my wife's hard drive in the first place.

Question: Assuming I can re-format the bad drive (and lose ALL files, of course), do you think it's OK to use it again? Or, is it likely to fail again? I've NEVER had a hard drive fail before...

[dsvochak]

I'll have to remember this. I've got one of those parallel port zip drives around somewhere.

Given what you had happen, I wouldn't count on the hard drive lasting much longer. but, if you've got reliable zip disks you can do regular backups. It's certainly a lot cheaper than data recovery.

A friend of mine says there are 2 kinds of motorcycle riders: those who have fallen and those who will fall. There are 2 kinds of computer users: those who have had a hard failure and those who will.

Welcome to the club.

[leoblob]

There are 2 kinds of computer users: those who have had a hard failure and those who will.

Welcome to the club.

Thanks, I'm happy to be a new member! (Guess I was lucky to make it this long without a failure.)

A final question... do you think it's possible that the hard drive failure (perhaps a corruption of the FAT) could have been due to a virus? My wife's computer has Norton Anti-Virus (not the "best" I know, but still credible) which is updated and scanned frequently, and she only goes to "friendly" sites... ?? (BTW, the drive is 5 years old...)

[GomJabbar]

A final question... do you think it's possible that the hard drive failure (perhaps a corruption of the FAT) could have been due to a virus? My wife's computer has Norton Anti-Virus (not the "best" I know, but still credible) which is updated and scanned frequently, and she only goes to "friendly" sites... ?? (BTW, the drive is 5 years old...)

Anything is possible, but in your case I would tend to doubt it. If you delete all existing partitions, create a new partition, and format the hard drive successfully, maybe a virus was the culprit.

Following are a couple of hard drive testing programs that may give a clue.

Hitachi Drive Fitness Test

Fujitsu Drive Fitness Test

[leoblob]

Thank you for the links!