help

[daf]

i came back home this evening to find my pc in a sorry state.
my main hard drive keeps giving me this error:


i have tried everything i can think of to make it work again [restarting windows, scandisk, checking the IDE cable & power cables, shouting at it, moving it from one IDE slot to the other] but all to no avail :(
i ran partition magic in the hope that it might be able to help... it told me this:


the disk in question had something in the region of 100GB of information on it which i really don't want to lose.
don't know if it makes any differnce or not, but i'm using is windows 98.
if anyone has any ideas as to how i can fix this problem, please let me know.

Comments

[panzerbjrn.livejournal.com]

That does look pretty bad.
It looks like it's probably a hardware fault, but you might want to try to install Windows 2000 or XP and see if they can read it.

The size of the harddrive makes me think that maybe you've run into the size limit built into earlier versions of Windows. If you try to install windows 2000 you can get a patch for it (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013). I believe Windows XP already has the ability to read large drives.

Good luck...

[mildseven.livejournal.com]

I have a crack team working on it right now.

well

[gommog.livejournal.com]

drop me an e-mail tomorrow just after 12 and i'll connect to your pc and take a looksee but from the look of things you've lost stuff. You coming to norwich on friday?

D:\ is being feculent

[mildseven.livejournal.com]

This is what I've discovered.

Chances are 50/50 that the information is gone. Usually when a drive
appears unformatted, you can only use it by formatting - which results
in data loss anyway. My suggestion to you is to find a buddy's
computer who is running WinXP. When you boot the drive as a slave in
his/her computer, WinXP can detect it as a drive that has
malfunctioned and will request to run a checkdisk on it. If WinXP
runs a checkdisk or a repair on the hard drive, you should be able to
view all the data. (It will take just a few minutes)

Other than that, I would test it in a few others with more recent
Operating Systems to see which one can read your drive. If that
doesn't work...well....the unspeakable might have occurred....