Good morning all-

I have a couple of questions regarding my weekend fun with a SMART failure on my primary OS drive. Naturally the SMART noticification game me a 0 boot warning - meaning, I received the message and computer won't boot through windows (XP). My hunch is that bad sectors have ate my lunch as well as some of the boot record information.

Here is some information:

WD Raptor - WD740GD-00NLR1 (74GB 10,000 rpm Raptor)

Windows XP +SP3
Q6600 (oc'd to 3.4) / ASUS P5K / 4 GB GeiL Ram / 8800 GTS 640 / 750OCZ eXtreme psu

The drive is right at 4 years old and currently under warranty. Advanced RMA is already underway. While I am waiting on the replacement drive, I was wondering if there is any way to brute force this drive back in to submission for about 1 hour (or less). I just want to make sure I have some current data. Here is what I tried last night to no avail

1) XP recover counsel
2) CHKDSK /r

*** I get a message that notes "Drive is not Valid / or dive is empty" (or very close to that message)

3) Since I received the above message I tried FIXMBR c:\ and Fixboot c:\ which yield no changes to the drive.

4) Review the MAP under the recovery counsel, the drive is listed but neither NFTS nor FST32

What can I do with 3rd party software or otherwise to beat this drive in to submission?

Thanks!

Benjamin

Is your drive still in BIOS? If you can see your drive in BIOS it could mean a partition problem on your drive. Do not continue on with all this software you will destroy your data. Stop and if it is only a partiton problem on the drive take it to a repair shop before destroying more of your data and loosing it all. This type of repair should not cost you so much to recover you data and then change out your drive

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Iorana Haraharaini

It's still visible from BIOS (it knows the model number etc) - SMART - Failure notification etc.

However, recover counsel doesn't know if it's NFTS or FAT...

I am not doing anything with the drive now as it's the OS. All I want to do it pry it up to check a few things and then it can rest in peace.

You shouldn't ever run checkdisk on a failing drive.

As the others said, take it to a good local repair shop (i.e. not best buy) or try to image it yourself.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Can some one explain what exactly is the smart attr "Power- Off Retract Cycle", "emergency retract ".

Thanks
Eleana

Ok, what is a good sound imaging software that's out there? There seem to be a lot of options.

Same results with that as say something payware like Acronis?

Nope as in "no difference" right?

Ok, thanks. I will give it a try tomorrow once I get the new HDD and OS up and running.

thanks for the help.

Benjamin.