I feel sick... Hard drive not found... need help asap =(

[bluefish6]

Ok, so I wanted to help my friend out with her computer that was messing up... cleaned out spyware and all that, then was installing SP2 and it bluescreened...

did a hard drive diagnostic and it found a bad sector.... it gave the option to fix the sector, so I did it... then the computer reboot out of nowhere and it says the hard drive can't be found...

can't find it in the diagnostic... can't find it in ERD commander...

I'm so sad/scared right now that I totally messed up her computer and lost her data.

Please help =(

If at all possible, I would love real-time-help...my screen name is GotBinary... i would be happy to post the chat log here so that others can benefit... im just in so much trouble if i can't get this going

:sad::sad::sad::sad::sad:

edit: its a dell 600m

[John A]

OK, first of all, you should know what a "bad sector" is. It's a bad spot in the disk, and a disk utility can't simply repair it. What this means is that the hard drive is deteriorating, and you should get a new hard drive ASAP.

As for recovering data, what I would suggest is hooking it into another computer, and booting off a hard drive that still works..... and then see how much data you can copy over. If you see nothing at all, you'll probably need a special program to recover data.

[bluefish6]

OK, first of all, you should know what a "bad sector" is. It's a bad spot in the disk, and a disk utility can't simply repair it. What this means is that the hard drive is deteriorating, and you should get a new hard drive ASAP.

As for recovering data, what I would suggest is hooking it into another computer, and booting off a hard drive that still works..... and then see how much data you can copy over. If you see nothing at all, you'll probably need a special program to recover data.

I appreciate the reply... but yeah.. bad sectors *can* be repaired if you know what you're doing... it took me about 4 hours but I repaird about 200 of them and the hard drive can now be recognized, I just need to find some good software that wont freeze while rescuing corrupted files.