bad hard drive

[spudly1987]

i have a lab top where the hard drive has been corupped and now the os is not loading up on it at all but there are very important files that i need to get off the hard drive, does anyone have any ideas of how i can do this, the os that was on there was windows 7.

[CimmerianX]

You can pop out the hard drive, and use a USB to IDE/SATA adapter to hook up the drive like a USB-drive.

I use this one: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2329300&CatId=3770

The adapters are pretty cheap. As long as the drive's file system is readable and the drive works (hardware wise), then you should be able to look at the drive on another PC just like a USB stick.

[Xlphos]

Hello,

You may need to fix errors on the disk, if there are corrupt sectors you may need to scan the file system for errors.

Have a look at this. If you can boot into windows with command prompt you maybe able to do it.

If you are using the method in the previous post you will need a system to transfer the data to. If you can't fix that hard drive you are going to need a new hard drive, you will need to reinstall windows.

- Let us know how it goes.

[dspnhn]

try using a bootable disk and run HDDreg from the disk it might show u the cause

[spudly1987]

thanks for the posts so far, i have tried to load up the hard drive into another pc using a sata connection and it wants to run a check disk the stage 1 of 3, and in stage 1 there is a lot of them that say for ex file 304 unreadable and then after a bit it goes to stage 2, and it gets stuck at 58 percent and wont budge.

[spudly1987]

i have also bought a version of windows 7 and tried to install that operating system on the hard drive as well and it doesn't even goto to 1% when trying to install maybe im not giving it enough time but i have waited an hour, i was also thinking about formatting the hard drive and wiping it clean and then try to install a hacked version of windows not sure if that will work or not.

[Xlphos]

I don't think a hacked version of windows would do any better. Something is wrong with the hard drive disk, sort that out and you should be able OK.

[laima]

Modern hard drives present a consistent interface to the rest of the computer, no matter what data encoding scheme is used internally. Typically a DSP in the electronics inside the hard drive takes the raw analog voltages from the read head and uses PRML and Reed–Solomon error correction[58] to decode the sector boundaries and sector data, then sends that data out the standard interface. That DSP also watches the error rate detected by error detection and correction, and performs bad sector remapping, data collection for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, and other internal tasks.Hard Disk Manager

[kes166]

if you can plug the hard drive into another computer, run chkdsk /r /f [driveletter]:

It may take a day to complete, but it may repair the OS.

Another option is to try a recovery of the OS instead of a complete install.

[justgivemeone]

if you have another hdd load ubuntu ste as master set w7 as slave use ubuntu to read slave it worked for me