Help with problem diagnosis and data recovery

External Since: Dec 08, 2003 Posts: 14

A relative had a PC working correctly using XP Pro. Turned it off
one evening and when turned on the next day, it blue screened.

The HD is a Maxtor Diamond Plus 80GB IDE model. Only around six
months old, so still in warranty and only used for office
applications.

I tried it in other machines, same problem. The BIOS recognises the
drive (when placed as a slave in another PC) but the drive is not
accessible and doesn't show up in XP as being there in "My Computer"
or other file managers. (Strangely, IIRC it was identified in
System->Hardware devices, showing up as a SCSI drive !!)

HD s/w downloaded from Maxtor shows it passes the quick tests but
fails almost immediately on the full test, meaning the drive is
defective.

Any clues as to the cause - electronics? Any suggestions as to s/w
or other methods to recover the data ? (Almost the whole data had
been backed up a couple of days before this disaster but I would still
like to try and access the drive to grab back a couple of files)

Many thanks for any help.

Frank.

External Since: Nov 30, 2003 Posts: 273

The drive shows up in Device Manager but not My Computer. That means the
partition table is gone, possible due to a bad MBR sector.

I would start with the Windows version of findpart and search for bad
sectors. If there are not too many at the beginning, you should be able to
recover.

<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://inet.uni2.dk/%7Esvolaf/utilities.htm" target="_blank">http://inet.uni2.dk/%7Esvolaf/utilities.htm</a>

"No-one" <No-one DeleteThis @nowhere.notime> wrote in message
news:p8h9tvg42accnbspcp1k3qkp82okam1lhi@4ax.com...
> A relative had a PC working correctly using XP Pro. Turned it off
> one evening and when turned on the next day, it blue screened.
>
> The HD is a Maxtor Diamond Plus 80GB IDE model. Only around six
> months old, so still in warranty and only used for office
> applications.
>
> I tried it in other machines, same problem. The BIOS recognises the
> drive (when placed as a slave in another PC) but the drive is not
> accessible and doesn't show up in XP as being there in "My Computer"
> or other file managers. (Strangely, IIRC it was identified in
> System->Hardware devices, showing up as a SCSI drive !!)
>
> HD s/w downloaded from Maxtor shows it passes the quick tests but
> fails almost immediately on the full test, meaning the drive is
> defective.
>
> Any clues as to the cause - electronics? Any suggestions as to s/w
> or other methods to recover the data ? (Almost the whole data had
> been backed up a couple of days before this disaster but I would still
> like to try and access the drive to grab back a couple of files)