Re: moving boot drive to new HD & recovering data from corrupt HD

Replace the drive!

The last bit of information, excessive reallocated sectors, sheds a
different light on your problem. You don't have logical disk corruption. You
have physical disk problems, and these can not be corrected.

During manufacture of a hard drive, x amount of extra, unused sectors, are
kept in reserve on the drive. These are never written to. If the drive
suffers from physical problems, and sectors become bad, they are switched
out with the spares (logically, of course). When the store of spares has
been used up, the drive, for all practical purposes, should be disposed of.
Many do not wait for the problem to become this large and trash a drive when
the first few are detected. Where one lives, others are certain to populate.

Remember the difference between logical corruption and physical
corruption/damage. And be certain to explain, as best and completely as you
can exactly what error messages have been seen with regards to the problem.

--
Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!



"Rob.T" <Rob.T.2c4y6s@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Rob.T.2c4y6s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi guys ... thanks for getting back to me so quickly on these problem.
You both reference the completence of the Tech/Sales Person ... if
there is one thing I have found in buying & upgrading my systems is
that there is a pretty significant amount of variance in the basic
knowledge of the people you are dealing with at different stores. I
started frequenting the shop I have been going to for the last few
years (a one-person branch of a small chain) because the Tech was
really excellent. For example, in the past I moved the operating
system from one disk to another with no problem, thanks to this guy.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Unfortunately, when I went to the
shop yesterday, there was a new guy there, and he didn't have a clue!!
Hence, my present dilema(s).

Ghallek, thanks for the info on changing the boot partition. Can you
refer me to someplace which will provide a little more detailed
explanation ... i.e. with a step by step "for dummies" approach. I
confess BIOS / Hardware issues are not my strong suit.

Richard, you may be right that I was had, although I am a firm believer
in the adage that you should never attribute to malevolence that which
could be more easily attributed to incompetence. As I explained, the
computer was shutting down & then when it tried to reboot it gave me a
"NTLDR is missing; press CTRL+ALT+DEL" error message. Pressing C/A/D
didn't work by the way ... I had to restart it. I ran some diagnostics
on it, and the problem was around "reallocated sector count". One of
the tools I used stated that becasue the disk had 764 reallocated
sectors, the hard disk needed to be replaced. Now, I don't have a clue
what that means and, unfortunately, neither did the Tech!

If the disk is salvagable, great! However, my big concern at this
point is rescuing some of the data from the old partition which is
giving me the "E:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is
corrupted and unreadable" message. After that, I will do a CHKDSK,
reformat .... whatever ... and determine if the disk is truly nackered.
I've been googling some more, and some software pops up ... "Ontrack
Easy Recovery Professional" (which I have heard of) and a program
called "GetDataBack" (which I have never heard of). Do you guys know
anything about these products?

Thanks again!!




--
Rob.T


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: moving boot drive to new HD & recovering data from corrupt HD
    ... If the old disk is the one that is "physically" corrupted - I wouldn't even ... Richard Urban Wrote: ... The last bit of information, excessive reallocated sectors, sheds a ... Remember the difference between logical corruption and physical ...
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