Ya try Ubuntu its free to download and easy enough you can just pop on and see if its good or not. and if thats they problem you hd might have failed so check your Warranty on it.
Ya try Ubuntu its free to download and easy enough you can just pop on and see if its good or not. and if thats they problem you hd might have failed so check your Warranty on it.
Just booting from the disk won't give you any answer at all... Because LiveCDs run off the CD and not a HDD, you could actually run the computer HDD-less. You'd still need to go through the various steps to find out if it is or isn't formatted (through the installer, mounting the HDD, etc).
AKA_RA, get File Scavenger. It isn't free, but it's so handy and useful you'll thank yourself for getting it. It recovered files from my mom's camera memory stick that had been formatted at least 5 times after the pictures were taken. Trust me, it's definitely worth it.
RIP Bucko
th HDD shows up fine in XP, wont say its formatted though. i ran some random recovery software to see if anyhting shows up, and it did. after several hours, it got to about 40% and showed over 300,000 "recoverable" files. It didnt get AST 46% though, so either the scan takes for freaking ever, or it froze the first time. If it froze, i can imagine several reasons, like bad sectors, etc. I plan on running File Scavenger as soon as I get the chance.
I was considering RMA'ing the drive after getting the info off it, but I don't think the drive is bad, just the partition file. Well see.
Boot off he install disk. When my comp died the place I was doing work experience at showed me a free ware program that allows you to access the busted HDD/computer and copy all of your files to a new HDD then format the old one. Worked great, managed to retrieve everything I needed. Can't remember what the program is called though. By the way the HDD scan will take forever, my 200Gb IDE took about 6-8 hours to scan in three parts (surface,?,total scan).
EDIT:
I just found these, may be of some use to you.
http://www.data-recovery-software.ne...oad.shtml#demo
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/B...-recovery.html
http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm
Hope these help.
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