Hard drive - Dead or Alive?

[Arastar]

I'll try to keep this brief. PC Specs at the end.

I had a crash on a 60gig HD. It was my boot drive. No matter what I did it would not boot up. Blue Screen right after Windows XP was loading. Couldn't get past that...safe mode...safe mode with prompts....nothing worked.

I removed it, and reverted to a second HD that was in the system and had Win98 on it. Installed XP Pro in another directory and that has me running fine. Installed drivers..etc. Removed WIN98. So now I have the HD with the fresh XP and a second drive that is basically empty. (Neither are my crashed 60 gig). System runs great!

So my question is this...no matter what I've tried I cannot get into my 60gig to retrieve some of the files. If I connect it to the PC, no matter what my jumpers are set at, it tries to boot the system...and of course crashes it. I bought Partition Magic at a suggestion. Tried to switch the drive from Primary to Logical using rescue disks and I got enough errors on the drive that the program said there were too many and then just quit.

The drive doesn't make any mechanical noise...somehow it was just corrupted. Is there ANY way I'll be able to get info off of this thing without spending $1000 at some recovery place? Any other ideas out there?

Thanks in advance!

PC:
Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum MB
512mb PC2700 ram
Windows XP Pro
MSI 128mb Video Card
OB Sound
CD-RW
DVD-Rom
2- 10gig Hard drives
1 (hopefully not) dead 60 gig drive, sadly sitting on my desk...sulking.

[brad]

Just a thought...Did you try Booting with the Startup Disk and running fdisk, making the "good" drive the active drive?
brad

[Arastar]

If you mean the Partition Magic Startup Disk...then no I didn't do that..but in the start up utility, when I was trying to revert my 60gig into a Logical drive, the good drive was already set at Primary.

Not sure if that's what you were getting at.

Basically, since I'm running off a fresh install, XP went ahead a configured things as if it were a brand new system so that 60gig hasn't even been introduced "officially" yet.

[Arastar]

[brad]

[Gecko]

You could try a data recovery program.
is a free data recovery program.
If you have a FAT23 files system then you will need PC Inspector File Recovery
If you have a NTFS files system then you will need PC Inspector smart recovery

[Arastar]

Brad~

I'm removing the "empty" drive and putting in the 60 gig there...set as slave. I'm was leaving the drive that currently has XP in it with the hopes that it would boot the PC and then I could look at the 60 gig.

Gecko~

I have downloaded both but I actually forget which format I have the 60 formatted in so I'll find that out and try your solution.

Thanks to both of you for you help!! I'll post as soon as I have some info.

Ara

[brad]

With that setup is your BIOS configured to boot from 1st Hard Drive?
brad

[Restek]

If you want to make absolutely sure that the 60gig is not booted, connect it as the secondary slave and use partition magic to make sure that the 60gig partition is not 'active'. Then reboot & you should boot as normal (from your good drive).

[Arastar]

Restek~

I'll give that a shot too. If it's not active I'll still be able to access it?

Thanks for everyone's input!

[Arastar]

Restek~

I looked and looked but couldn't find where to "deactivate" the drive in Partition Magic. Realize I'm doing this with the rescue disks and not from within windows because I can't boot up with that 60gig installed. Any thoughts?

Gecko~
Unfortunately it seems that PC Inspector only works from within Windows and since I can't boot my system with the bad drive, I don't think that solution will work. Thanks though!

[Arastar]