HD Crashed, looking for advice

[tekcajder]

I bought a pair of seagate 160gb drives about 2 years ago. One crapped out on me today. Initially, data wasn't showing up, i'd open a file, it'd take a minute or so before anything showed up, then it would only show 100 files when there had been 1,500 or so previously. I rebooted and it went through the whole 'xp drive verfication' bit ... it showed certain sectors as being unreadable.

i pulled the drive out, hoping i'd stop any further problems.

my question is, has anyone ever had this happen? i'm not quite sure what to do next, the information on the drive means alot to me, it has around 15,000 photographs, all of my digitized work, and about 7 years of computer related material (i.e. - all of my work from university)

the drive acted purely as storage, the other drive had alot more traffic, i was constantly changing things on it and using it ... the only real usage this drive had was when i'd occasionally dump photos to it (or recall a file) ... or when i'd use photoshop, it would cache a portion to the disc.

 

[daphatgrant]

Is the drive making any odd noises, clicks or whatnot? Maybe try it in a different computer.

 

[BillParrish]

Ouch, about a zillion people, they do fail for various reasons. I trash em. (not putting in lecture on data backup, your welcome. ).

Segate has diagnostics sofware and trouble shooting info here.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=720bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

If you wallet is very thick they can thin it out for you as they offer recovery services.

There is no simple answer. You might try a google of "data recovery" but all I find is commercial sites nothing for free on first couple of result pages.

 

[gjvrieze]

At work i have had very very results with Steve Gibson's Spinrite, i have acutual been able to recover 90% of the drives that had failed..... 10% being the ones with dead electronics.... I would give it a try, i think it get you back a going again. I have many stories of my own from Spinrite, and the best is a machine that windows would take 45+ minutes to boot to the desktop, and the drive was no better trying to back it up. So i ran Spinrite in level 2 and then i had to leave for the night, but when i came into work the next day, my boss was messing around Windows like the machine was new, he had no idea it had a dieing drive