hard drive failure?!

[mikeUK]

hi,

my friends pc was playing up for ages and I insisted he should back up and reformat, he didnt listen lol and then the other day, the pc crashed in a virus scan. He reset and tried to boot up, the pc launched straight into a microsoft disk check and just filled the screen with a hundreds of messages saying "File Record Segment 106543 is unreadable" with the number going up one every time. I suggested virus that has corrupted the harddrive, tried to restore the boot and mbr sectors, same thing, tried to start in last known configuration, same thing. The safe mode hangs on one of the drivers loading up.

when you try starting in DOS using win 98 se startup disk, it just ignores the harddrive and says there is no valid partition.

I said I would try and recover files but it doesnt seem possible. The pc and harddrive are still under warranty with "Novatech" based in portsmouth UK, an hour drive.

Is it worth the petrol to send it back lol, what do you guys reckon I can do, I would like to backup something. I was thinking to pop another harddrive with an OS on, try to access the other drive, backup or format, then recover using data recovery software which I have.

cheers

mike

[Gecko]

[mikeUK]

oops forgot to mention that i used the windows xp repair, didnt work


i know about the 98 se
but what i meant was, in dos it couldnt find anything at all

[Restek]

As you found, DOS cannot read NTFS partitions. Slaving the drive to a working hard disk is probably the easiest option, although most decent recovery programs seem to be able to read NTFS partitions even if you run them just from a DOS bootdisk. If you do the boot from DOS thing though, remember that you still need somewhere to recover the files to. This is why slaving is better, because you have the working hard drive to recover the files to