donk

I have a hard drive that I took out of a machine given to me to repair. All I know is that he was doing a defrag and for some reason stopped or that is what he said, which in most cases should not have effected the boot process. After he tried to restart it would only return back to restart again. I have taken the drive and piggy backed it to my machine by attaching it to my IDE ribbon as a slave, actually cable select. My system would boot up in less then 45 seconds to a minute. Once I had attached the other drive to the ribbon it takes forever. Anyway, once in I again have to wait, and when I go to my computer and click on the new installed drive it asks if I want to format my drive. What could he have done by stopping the defrag process to cause it to have to be reformatted? I would not really care as i have now installed a new drive, but he has all his files stuck on the old harddrive. I am able to keep my system up and running through alot of help from tech Support forum, Thanks. back to the problem at hand. I think I, or he is probably S.O.L. Any advice would help, Thanks again.
(seagate, barracuda) 80gb

Donk

Tumbleweed36

If you want to check it for errors, then use the drive manufacturer's utility (free download) called Seatools. That would tell you if there is anything wrong.

Second, if it were mine, I would not use CS to attach it on your rig. If you have two drives on that cable, then make one master (jumper settings) and put it on the end of the ribbon cable, and make the other one slave (jumper settings) and put it on the middle connector. Try it that way and see if it works. Just make sure if you have two drives on that cable, that they are either Master/Slave or CS/CS which I don't like to use personally. Make sure they aren't mixed with each other.

linderman

the drive is asking to be reformatted because it has been transfered from one computer to another


if you want to recover the data I would use GETDATBACK from runtime.org rather easy to use


but first I would go to the hard drive manufactures website and download their free diagnostic utility and run it against the drive >>>> make sure you run the extended test

this will verify if the drive is mecahically sound ???

BTDT

I would suggest to connect the drive onto a separate IDE cable, say remove the CD Rom drive and put it on there. (you can run without the CD drive for a while). This should reduce any data errors affecting your system drive and OS operation.

Then use a tool called "R-STUDIO data recovery" from http://www.r-tt.com

It is a fantastic tool which allowed me to recover my whole email server store when my server crashed. It is not a free tool, but well worth the cost and once you have it, you always have it.

Changing PC's should not affect whether the HDD is visible in the other machine if you have a fairly recent BIOS.

The problem with the drive might be that the File Allocation Table (or FAT) became corrupted (If it is a FAT file system formatted drive). The drive's partition information also may have been affected. This may have been caused by a "Badspot" on the physical media of the disk.

This utility reads drives and file systems that are even not recognised by BIOS ! (and no, I don't work for them as a salesman :)

linderman

if a slave drive is partitioned and formatted using disk mangement; its drive geometry properties are written to the boot drive; therefore when the boot drive is absent, or you clean install the OS on your boot drive >>>>so is the "map" to run the slave drive now gone

Deleted090308

Sounds like the boot sector is corrupt/damaged.

Download the Windows version of TestDisk.
Unzip the downloaded file to your C: drive.
Open C:\testdisk-6.9\win > double click the "testdisk_win" icon.

The program runs in a command window and doesn't have to be installed.

Each of the steps (A, B, C etc) below corresponds to a new TestDisk window.
Use the keyboard's arrow keys to navigate.

A. At the first window, select “No Log” and press the <Enter> key.
B. Select which drive to analyse, choose “Proceed” and <Enter>.
C. Select partition type – Intel if it’s a PC then <Enter>.
D. Choose Advanced > press <Enter>.
E. Choose Boot > press <Enter>.

New screen - please post back with a screenshot.

donk

Thanks, This might take some time. I will try all and post back.
Donk
PS, the drive was not partitioned. (Linderman) I have added many drives to my OS using a seperate ide ribbon and never had to partition my drive. One learns something new every day. I am not trying to use the drive as a boot drive. One should be able to access all file's and folders from the slave drive. Your system will find the new drive at boot up and all should be good to go. I am not sure just what he did to mess this thing up as to not be able to run as a slave and remove files, pictures and what not. All I know is you may be wright as far as losing the boot sector even though it was not partitioned and did not have a third party OS selector like Acronis. I have partitioned my drive without deactivating Acronis and lost the ability to boot in to my system. Live and learn. Anyway, thanks and I will give it a go.

linderman

all hard drives have at least one partition! even if its all just one big chunk