how to disable a hard drive

[Pyromidion]

About a week and a half ago, I powered up my machine only to have windows XP go to its "startup / disk checker" (the one before it shows the welcome screen) and has a look at one of my drives. It finishes, and I log in only to find that my E drive "is not formatted, would you like to format it now?" (no, because my data is still there).

I've looked in my admin services log to see that every second or so, i have a disk error to that drive, and its rather bogging down my system. I'd like to somehow disable / turn off the drive for the moment, only the problem is, its only a partition (not a physical drive, which i coud just unplug), which shares the same physical drive as my boot drive.

Is there a way i can tell windows XP (pro) to just kind of forget about it / disable its attemps at reading it? Another question would be...even if it cant be accessed by windows, could i safely run 'scandisk' to attempt to eliminate the errors without risking my data?

-John

 

[Leeoniya]

found this thread for you:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=20568
see post #7.

as far as data recovery....use a disk recovery or disk editor software to open the physical or logical disk.
here is free data recovery soft: http://www.smartpctools.com/data_recovery/index1.html
i've never used it, so i cant tell you, but it will tell you if the partition is at least accessible maybe. hopefully it sees it even though it will be hidden.

Leon

 

[Pyromidion]

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!! that did the trick for the lagging and what not. I'll bring the drive to a friend who has some recovery tools for the data, but in the meantime...I know im not supposed to use a dying drive, but hah, its my boot drive too. anyway...



-john