Topic awaiting preservation: Advice needed! My hard drive is failing!

Hello,

My OS is Windows 2000. I have a harddrive that I suspect is failing. I suspect this because:
1) no longer boots into Win2k, screen flashes to blue on boot (99% into Win2k Splash Screen), small text appears briefly, and system automatically falls into a reboot

2) I have slaved this drive and have had some success backing this data up to the master drive -- however, I receive the error "Data error (cyclic redundancy check)" when copying some files (like outlook.pst file, which I really need!)

3) Checkdisk fails.

Has anyone heard of HDD Regenerator 1.42, and do you recommend this utility or any other types of utilities?

I appreciate the help.

Karl

If you or any of your friends have any demo disc lying around, the kind that come with PC magazines, you should check and see if any of them have a copy of Spinrite on them. If they don't then I suggest you head over to http://grc.com/spinrite.htm and buy a copy of Spinrite 6. It will set you back $89 but if your data is important to you and the drive is still spinning then it is worth every penny. If you want a detailed description of what Spinrite is/does then follow that same link and navigate to the Spinrite Overview section of the site. I have used Spinrite to successfully recover data for many of my customers. Of course sometimes even Spinrite is unable to recover data from a crashed hard drive. When that happens I refer my customers to a data recovery facility if their data is very, very important. Like $800 a gig worth of important. Good luck!

(Edited by dmstiner on 11-24-2004 06:07)

Don't know any of the programs that have been mentioned but I reccomend that you google for reviews on them before dropping the cash for them.

Many drives that are on the way out responde well to being kept cool. My brother's drive would fail consistently in a warm office but worked when he brought it home to work on in the cooler basement or kept a case fan pointed directly on it.
I have heard of others puting the drive in a bag then in the freezer to get a more extreme cool down for the failing drive.

Heres an article on diagnosing a bad drive and another on data recovery.

__________________________
Eagles may fly high, but beavers don't get sucked into jet engines.
tj333- the semi-Christ

(Edited by tj333 on 11-24-2004 07:46)

Thanks for the input guys!

I JUST GOT HOSED BY MICROSOFT!!!!!!!!!!!

The drive I was having troubles with, I hooked it up to another drive as a slave. I than proceeded to back all data up to the masters 2nd logical drive "d drive". I then proceeded to reformat the "c drive" and restore this drive to a clean copy of Win2k. The reformating occured during the installation, I was prompted to chose which drive to reformat, so I chose the "c drive" (of course!!!). BUT!, windows, unbenonsed to me, changed the logical drive order so what I was really reformatting was the "d drive" that I had recently backed up to.

Okay, this really really REALLY SUCKS! FUCK!