HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi, I'm new to this recovery stuff so I'm hoping soemone here can help.

My system drive is a 240gb OCZ Agility 3 with 2 partitions of roughly equal size. My computer has started hanging forever on the blue windows flag screen when trying to boot. I pulled the drive out and hooked it up as a secondary drive in another computer and it prevented that computer from booting aswell! I then enabled hot swapping in the BIOS and booted the computer then connected the drive and refreshed in device manager and the drive was found with 1 partition accessible and the other showing up in explorer but not allowing me to access it. I copied all the data I need off the accessible partition OK although the speed was eratic. I have tried running both 'HDD raw copy tool' and 'R-studio' On this drive but both hang forever when trying to access the drive. My next plan of action was to try with an Ubuntu live CD. Hoping someone on here with more knowledge could shed some light on this. I'm not bothered about saving the SSD just some of the data off the other partition.

Thanks.

Hi! I think you have done well up to now. If I were you my next move would be try and make a complete drive image and save it as a single file on a good drive. You could use Ubuntu to do this. Personally as I am a bit lazy I would use Dmde in Windows which should work with your hot swap method. Once you have the image you can try to run recovery software on it to scan for your files. Good luck!

Hi, Thanks for the tip on dmde. I wasn't able to make an image as it was crashing dmde each time even with skip i/o errors selected but I was able to get in through 'open volume' and recover the data I need. I've already bought a replacement for the drive a samsung evo 240gb. Do you think the OCZ could be saved via format or similar? Would it be worth using it as a mirror drive for the samsung or could it negatively impact performance? Thanks.

I would go to a tall cliff and throw the OCZ as far as I could.