I have a failing hard drive with an "unmountable boot volume" error. There's important data on the drive. It doesn't mount in Windows or with Ubuntu, but the BIOS sees the drive. SpinRite and GetDataBack recovery attempts stop after about 5 seconds -- no luck.

SMART test says that the drive is going bad and needs to be replaced (no sh***!). HDDScan scanned the whole drive and reported 1 error. But if there happens to be damaged firmware modules, are these test results even telling the truth?

If I were to use a Windows CD to run a chkdsk /r I'm not sure if the drive would even be recognized. Probably not. But if it is recognized in the Windows recovery environment, could anything go terribly wrong from performing a chkdsk /r? Is this like playing Russian roulette with critical data?

Does chkdsk only scan the data partition, and NOT the hidden system area partition?

It would help if you told us the manufacturer and model firstly.

Don't run chkdsk or spinrite or any other utility that keeps hammering away trying to read sectors....you WILL kill the drive quickly and find yourself in a whole new world of pain and expense.

You need to get an image of this disk before you go any further.

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Data Recovery Ireland

Fujitsu MHV2120BH

I wonder why MicroSoft doesn't warn people about this. Their solution is chkdsk /r
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555302

Have you actually seen a situation where SpinRite scrapped down a sector? The people at SpinRite told me that their software doesn't hurt drives, but rather just recovers the data that was originally stored in sectors and, if the sector is no longer capable of reliably reading and writing that data, the DRIVE ITSELF, using its built-in sector relocating system, "spares the sector out", removing it from further service. This is all NORMAL operation of the drive.

In my own opinion, chkdsk should only be run on healthy drives.

Spinrite is not a data recovery tool. I'm not sure why anyone would use this destructive program unless they wanted to damage a drive further.
http://www.myharddrivedied.com/weblog/w ... _my_d.html

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

The point is something that no software vendor is going to tell you. When the drive is failing or in question, the first and only response(if possible) is to image. If it is not possible to image send to a pro. Checkdisk, and Spinright especially are running the drive without actually recovering the data. They are even writing to it.

I am disappointed in my CompTIA A+ 2009 book. Page 353 reads "SpinRite can recover data from a failing hard drive when other software fails."

That's a great link DellGuy.