Running an XP machine at work. It serves up a little IIS and SQL Server for a small crew. Today, blue screen of death. Rebooting just gets me more blue, saying it can't find a bootable partition. No luck with safe mode. Boot into the Windows XP recovery console. Chkdsk craps out at 25% saying unrecoverable errors have occurred. FIXBOOT won't run.

Fast forward to tonight. I have a dual boot machine at home with XP and Windows 7. I attach the damaged drive and I boot up into Windows 7, it sees the drive, starts installing drivers, and says it's ready to go. But it isn't in windows explorer. If I go to my PC's properties, under hardware, the damaged drive is listed and it says the device is working properly.

I was hoping to be able to connect and at least do a dump of the data, even if I can't get the drive booting correctly.

Can someone steer me in the right direction? BTW, the HDD is a Western Digital WD800ADFD-75NLR1

Same disk, same symptoms here. Tried to take a dd image of the disk, but it stalled for several hours with about a 40 GB file created. I don't know if it's a useable file, and I'm not sure how to properly restore to a matching drive that I have.

Anyone have tips for using dd for data recovery?

Many tools I've tried just choke and die when pointed to this drive. Read errors frequently cited. Active@ Partition Recovery sees the partition, and after a *very* long scan (many hours), can list some files from the drive. I haven't figured out yet how to get it to copy files off the drive, and it may not be possible with my demo version.

Anyway, the work has been very instructive, even if not terribly productive. The data isn't all *that* valuable, but I'm a geek and find intrinsic value in this sort of thing. It isn't the first time I've tried to recover data from crashed drive, and it won't be the last I'm sure.

Good luck igendreau. I'll be watching the thread. I'll post anything I learn that might be relevant to your plight.

- Dan

I feel your pain.

Update: The farthest I can get things so far... I'm using Active Partition Recovery as well. With a QuickScan I can get it to list the entire contents of my drive. It shows up in this hierarchy:

My Hard Drive Model
-->Unallocated Partition
---->Local Disk (#0)
------->Listing of all my directories

But when I click the Local Disk and hit recover, it tells me that the drive has not been properly initialized by the OS, and to use Fix MBR. So I run Fix MBR and it says "Unable to read sectors of the device"

Unfortunately, my data is very critical... please help! lol

Hi,

Your drive is dieing.

If you wil continue the forcing with non-professional scanner programs, you will kill it completely, and will multiple the recovery price in any dr labs....
I suggest to find a pro near you.
Your have 3-4 tips about what is the original problem, becasue i have seen these issue a lot of times, but none are in the user serviceable range, but all in the "user can do more problems or even an unrecoverable drive" range.

This case is easy at this moment, in my lab would quoted for a cheap range.
Maybe in some in other pros lab too....

Janos

Thanks for the warning / sales pitch Janos. I'm aware of the risks associated with attempted data recovery, and consider the opportunity to learn more about drive function and DR worth it in my case. I'm a lifetime geek / hacker / do-it-yourselfer and prefer not to pay somone else to do something I might be able to learn myself. I built my own deck, installed my own plumbing, fixed my own car, restored my own motorcycle, and have built / maintained / fixed computers and networks since my TRS-80's tape drive went bad in 1982. I've also ruined a sufficient number of projects to understand my limitations.

I'd appreciate specific guidance particular to this case if anyone can offer it. In the meantime, I'll continue reading the archives here.

- Dan