Hard Drive crashed

samrec

Moderator
Ok this is it.

Anyone knows of any tool that will recover data from a disk that is listed by the Bios and not seen from either vista or XP. Needless to say that all my trainz stuff is in there.

cheers
 
Ok this is it.

Anyone knows of any tool that will recover data from a disk that is listed by the Bios and not seen from either vista or XP. Needless to say that all my trainz stuff is in there.

cheers

I would get a USB caddy, put the drive in there and use something called "Tiramasu"/"On track recovery", and use a raw data recovery. Your file names won't be preserved, but you'll get most of your data back.
 
I would recommend downloading a Linux Live CD such as Ubuntu to run from the CD-ROM drive to see if it can access and recover your data.
 
Sadly I don't think you'll be able to recover the disk because this can be a more serious problem. When you say recognized by the BIOS, does it also show the correct size?

If not, that means that the translator circuit has died on the drive.

"Maxtor hard drive spins up fine, recalibrates, but identifies in BIOS with zero capacity by its factory alias(Calypso, N40P, Sabre etc) and as soon as you try to boot up or read data you get nothing but errors. This drive has corrupted translator. Translator is a part of hard drive firmware responsible for converting internal cylinder-head-sector addressing into OS-understandable LBA scheme. Without translator you will never get a single byte out of the drive."

from http://datacent.com/typical_data_recovery_cases.php

This company can recover your data for you if you want to give them a try.

If your BIOS shows the correct drive size, then it's more like the MFT has been corrupted. There are various utilities that can recover data from this. 7-tools makes one as well as Symantec and others.

Good luck. This is a real bummer of a problem.

John
 
Back it up

I like to use the rule of 3-2-1
Three forms of backup, on at least two forms of media (say HD and flash drive), and at least one offsite (the cloud).
That said, if your drive is not being recognized, sounds like you may need to send this off to a professional data recovery company for a physical recovery. Be prepared for a pricey recovery, HD recoveries are involved.
 
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