After recovery, drive will not boot

[styrafoam]

A friend of mine had his 750gig seagate die, after looking at it I told him he would need to take the drive to a data recovery service to retrieve any files he might want. The drive would spin up, and was visible in disk management, partitions would show up, but would not allow for any sort of interaction with the files saying that the drive must be formated, the usual software tools were unsuccessful. My suspicion was he had a bios or circuit board problem.

He ended up taking the drive to a recovery service, and the service was successful in recovering his drive. They also offered to image a replacement drive from the data retrieval. After installing the new drive it refused to boot, and he brought it to me.

New drive is partitioned exactly as the previous drive was, and all files show up when hooking the drive to another computer using a usb adapter. Booting from a windows disk and doing a startup repair allowed the boot partition to be found, but that resulted in booting to a black screen with a cursor. Running chkdsk from windows recovery was unsuccessful, saying that the drive was read only and chkdsk could not run. Running chkdsk on the drive from a second computer allowed the drive to boot to the "starting windows" screen, but not boot completely. Computer now bluescreens shortly after the starting windows screen disappears and the mouse cursor pops up.

Any assistance or suggestions are much appreciated, I would love to give his computer back to him in its original state rather than format it and reinstall.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I really think that you are asking too much, to expect a drive that was the result of data-recovery to actually boot back into the original OS.

Just reformat, on a new drive or SSD. (But not the drive that came back from the data-recovery place!)

 

[Elixer]

Yeah, I agree with VirtualLarry, you should be using a new SSD for the OS, or get a new HD, then on the drive they sent back, see if all the files you care about are still good, and not corrupted.

Data recovery services can only do so much, and I don't think any of them can guarantee that your data will be 100% after they try and recover as much as they can.

 

[LTC8K6]

They made you a new HDD yes? You are not using the old HDD?

Try changing the SATA setting in the bios?

 

[styrafoam]

Yes, image pulled from failed seagate onto a new WD. Computer is a Dell so there may not be much as far as bios options.

I fully agree that the data/OS used to image the drive may not be suitable to continue using, was just hopeful that there was a simple problem that typically needs to be corrected in these situations. Most likely wishful thinking-