Help recovering from crashed drive, please.

[JJHendrix]

During the night last night i think my primary drive crashed.
I have windows xp loaded on a secondary disk, so that's what i'm running now, i can get onto the hard drive and have taken off most of the important files i need.
The problem appears to be with the windows directory.
I tried running disk defragmenter to fix the problem but it wouldn't run because: "there is a corruption in file F:\WINDOWS"
Explorer crashes and my hard drive makes a bad grinding noise when i try to open the windows directory on the drive.
There are still files i want to get off of there, what should i do?
Are there any programs that can restore my drive or at least help me recover my data?

thanks.

 

[Davegod]

norton utilities has a good "undelete" etc, but you have to pay for it. i think theres some free 'undelete' type programs around so you might find a freeware or demo version. i'd reccomend norton though (BTW, i bought the version upgrade but it didnt ask for teh old cd or serial number or anything, and i was installing to a new comp)

note: do NOT install anything onto that drive as you might write over the files you need. Norton can run most stuff straight from CD.
also check for viruses.

of course theres always scandisk too but if it asks if it should repair files then thats a bit iffy, if it doesnt do it right (as it rarely does) it might screw up the file so undelete program cant recover it as well.

once all thats done try reinstalling windows over itself, so it only over writes its own files.

 

[Woody419]

You can try to recover file from DOS. Volkov Commander v.5 supports long file names, which should make the job easier. You may have to put this on a startup floppy, I never tried it with WinXP.

If your hdd still grinds try the freezer trick. Put it in your freezer for 1/2 hour, then try to recover data from the still cold drive.

 

[Wandere]

Try using Easy Recovery Pro from Ontrack.com

PM me if you need more information, I may have a backup here somewhere for evaluation purposes only. It has to scan the drive from an OS before you get any good lovin' (a downside)

Crashed drives are bad news m'friend, I recover data all of the time from medical computers at work....sometimes it's a piece of cake and others...ouch.

Powerquests Lost & Found 1.06 (latest) runs from a bootable floppy....very good at recovering from specific types of failures. I may have that one too...they were giving it away for free for a bit so there's no worry about bad software karma.

Good luck