Hard drive wants to be initialized

[Mary Burger]

Hello all!

I have a user whose home computer will not boot beyond the POST.  The screen goes black.  I booted with the windows XP CD and ran a repair install, but when it booted after the repair, same black screen after the post.

I took the hard drive out and hooked it up to another computer via a SATA/USB cable, and when I go into Disk management, it shows the disk there, but that it is unknown and not initialized.  It gave me a message stating that in order for disk management to recognize the disk, it has to be initialized.

Now, there is some data on this drive we want to make sure we recover.  Initializing will erase the data, I think.

What is the best way for me to get the data off of this drive?

Thanks in advance.

Mary Burger
ComputerDiva
Vancouver, WA

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

bad / corrupt / missing FAT or MBR ?

not sure if fdisk /mbr will get you anywhere.

I'd like be running ddrescue or other forensic tools on it, but recovery can take many hours as in days...

[Mark]

I wonder if you'd have any better luck plugging that USB port into a *nix box and trying to browse it.  If anything, maybe you'll get a better error message.  Though, you might only see something like "Unknown problem somewhere in the system." Which may or may not be useful.

[Jon Robinson]

You might just be SOL.  Usually means something is wrong on the inside.  You might be able to take it to a specialized shop for HD recovery, but you are looking at some very costly services.

[Jeff Golas]

If there's very important data to get back...you can try a product called activebootdisk but it costs a few bucks to buy. I think they have a freebie version that will show you what it CAN restore. It saved me some serious work when my laptop drive went fubared.

Oh and don't intialize it if you want the data back!

[Jeff Zylstra]

Don't know if something like Spinrite would help in this situation or not, but I have had some success using it on unreadable drives. 

[Mary Burger]

Thanks everyone for the ideas.  I actually plugged the drive into a different computer and had better luck.  I was able to back up all the data.  The drive did have some bad sectors, so I simply bought a new drive for the user.

Thanks again.

Mary Burger
ComputerDiva
Vancouver, WA

[Hans Manhave]

In that case, the utility Jeff mentioned, SpinRite, would probably fix it and you could still use the drive reliably for something.  I have repaired quite a few drives with SpinRite, the latest being my own office workstation and none of them have failed after a repair with SpinRite.  Of course, if it is a 4GB drive of some "ancient" type it would not be worth keeping nor be worth the price of SpinRite after you have now recovered the data.  Makes a nice range target.  I recommend .22WMR.  Give it a shot.