I have been having some problems with my old hard drive lately. It is an IDE drive. I have three hard drives in my system. A 75 GB boot drive which is working fine. A 450 GB drive which just disappeared, and another 450 GB that is working fine. I have been having problems with the D drive, the one that's broken, for a couple days now. I started windows 7 ultimate one day and startup got stuck on the starting windows screen. Then it went to a screen that said it needed to check my D drive for consistency. I let it check my D drive for about a half hour and then when it was finished it locked up and I had to do a hard shutoff. Then I turned on the computer again and it went to the same thing, but this time I cancelled it by pressing escape a couple times. I looked into this a little and I figured that my hard drive had a dirty bit. I did a little more research and figured out that I needed to run a script in CMD called "CHKDSK /f /r D:" I did this and let it run for two days straight. After two days it said it was on a certain file I cant remember the number it was, but It was stuck on that number for three days and I assumed it had failed. I closed CMD and tried to open the D drive in windows explorer. It loaded for a couple minutes then the computer locked up when it was near finished and I had to do a hard shut off. I turned my computer back on and it said what it did before, checking for consistency on D. I cancelled it and windows booted. Then I opened up explorer and D was gone. It's a 5 year old computer so I guess the hard drives have lasted pretty long, but I want to get the most out of it. Any ideas?
Wait, first off you got an IDE drive in a 5 year old computer? I haven't seen IDE ship in a system in like.... 9-10 years.
Does the drive still appear under device manager or the disk management tool?
No, it isn't the explorer or disk manager.
Not even under Device manager as a flagged device?
Not even in device manager.
Does it initialise at POST or show up within the BIOS?
It does show up in the BIOS and sorry for the late reply.
Hmmm, odd. There hasn't been any driver changes at all? In other words the only thing that has changed is the appearance of the dirty bit and then the disappearance of the drive from the OS.
The drive is on it's way out. A drive can show it up in the BIOS, but have problems when windows try's to read from it. There tricks like putting the drive in the fridge you may want to try that will allow you to get the data off, but i think the drive is dead.
Use Linux. It works on everything, even on half dead drives.
Is it bad that this is what I thought off when i saw "Dirty bit"?
What are some ways I could get roughly 300 GBs of data off of it? know by that is a stretch, but im sad my core 2 quad q6600 with 2 8800gt's is finally dying. :(
Sadly the drive could well be dying . I'd recommend using a linux distro (in live-CD mode will be fine) to see if the drive appears there. If so copy all the data out from it.
If it doesn't appear in linux... I pray you have a backup.
I've always wanted to test security with backtrack.
Well I tried to find the drive on ubuntu and it wasn't there. I guess the drive is dead. Any ideas to recover the data are appreciated.