rwnelson20

Okay, I have searched relentlessly for a solution to this problem. I am beginning to feel like my hard drive is truly dead and I refuse to put out hundreds to thousands of dollars for a data recovery service. This is my scenario.

My wife's HP Pavilion Vista 64 laptop displayed an error message that there was no bootable disk. It is a 250 g Seagate hard drive. Okay, I can handle this....I thought. I called HP support and they instructed me to go into BIOS and do a scan of the disk that failed. They sent me a new hard drive and I have to send back the old one soon or I get charged for the new drive.

I hooked up the hard drive to my laptop running Vista 32 and initially, it would not recognize there was a drive. The sound came on that I plugged in a USB drive and it was visible in the Device Manager but was nonexistent in Disk Management. I downloaded multiple free and trial versions of data and partition recovery programs that would not even show the hard drive to do anything. I found that putting the drive in the freezer might help so I tried that.

I finally got some of the programs to see the drive (although still not Disk Management or My Computer) but always got error messages or freezing up of the program on trying to do anything. Yesterday, I got some trial versions to run scans on the drive looking for FAT partitions and I was thrilled that it was actually looking at the drive. When they did not find anything, I decided to try NTSF. The program would just freeze and hang until I unplugged the drive. I tried the same FAT program that scanned before, and it too froze and hung until I unplugged the drive. Under My Computer - Manage drives, it froze and hung until I unplugged the drive and then got a message that Drives E and F (two separate messages) had to be formatted before they could be used, but of course at this point, the drive was disconnected and got the same result after plugging in. The recovery programs (including PC Inspector) did the same thing.

I tried moving the drive from the laptop to the desktop and nothing froze up but always got error messages. PC Inspector gave me this message:

error no.2
drv:129 LBA:0 blocks:1
Abort, Retry, Ignore?

I am at a total loss if there is anything that can be done aside from sending to a recovery service that I just am not financially able to do.

I tried Seagate Seatools and it failed every test. I haven't tried the advanced test because it said there was a strong possibility of data loss.

Is this drive truly dead to conventional means. Are there any other last resort options I haven't found. My wife never backed anything up because it was a very new computer (foolish us). I have to send the old hard drive back soon or I get charged which I don't care about if there is a possibility of retrieving at least the pictures (at least I have most of the pictures on my computer....and backed up).

Anyway, any help would be greatly appreciated. I found a few people with the same problem but no true solution, and I am hoping that somebody will have a new approach.

raptor_pa

Sounds like a failure in the head stack, unable to read LBA 0 so the drive cannot init. Connect it directly to a SATA port on your desktop, not using USB - USB works OK with healthy drives, but fails to pass some of the low level commands. Download the bootable CD of MHDD from www.hddguru.com and see if that can find the disk ( must be connected to the SATA port and the SATA port configured to IDE mode. ) If MHDD can't find the drive, then it is probably a head failure, and yes it is dead to about anything you can do at home... Without knowing the model number ( my guess is a momentus ) you are probably looking at $800 - $1700 for a recovery, the problem could be however, if it is a head failure, then you could have damaged the platters, trying to recover with software, to such a point that the drive might be unrecoverable due to platter scoring. Wish I had better news