HD Problem - Can't access it

[Blitzy]

Hey guys, I had this problem with my hard drive a month or so ago and decided to send it to a data recovery company, but before I do that, I think I should get your opinions on my situation.

My desktop was running fine for the whole day one day, without any problems. Before I went to sleep I turned it off, and when I woke up I tried to turn it on again. Instead of turning on normally, it went to a black screen saying "Reboot and Select proper Boot device" "Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key". I tried everything I could.. disconnecting/reconnecting, changing my BIOS settings, getting an IDE cable and connecting it to my laptop (which wouldn't recognize it - it could see that something was connected, it would install some drives, but then it wouldn't show up on My Computer and said "unrecognizable" when I went to Device Manager.) I also connected it as a slave hard drive on another desktop, but it still wouldn't work. I can hear the hard drive spin and gradually get warm when it's connected, so that part works.

Do you guys think that there's any chance that I could recover the data in it on my own, or is the data recovery my only option? If so, any companies that you reccomend? I was going to send it to AeroData, but I really don't know much about these companies. On a side note, do these companies keep information confidential, or should I be worried if I have downloaded files/personal info on there?

Thanks a lot, any info is very much appreciated.

[Paul Komski]

As long as the drive is being detected in the BIOS setup then I would test it with its own maker's diagnostics on a floppy or CD.

By all means try recovering the data with it slaved to a PC that can detect it in the BIOS setup. GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org) for FAT or NTFS has had a lot of success round here but by all means try other free programs (http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/datarecovery.shtml). GDB is almost certainly your best hope if the metadata or file system have been corrupted.

If you cant access the drive at all with GDB and the drive is seen in the BIOS setup then replacing the PCB is, nowadays, very much a long shot since the new PCB must be a very exact match. If you cant access the drive with any of the utilities mentioned in more than one PC then I would go for professional recovery.

[Blitzy]

Wow, thank you so much. I hooked up my HD as a slave, windows recognized it, but it wouldn't show up under dis managements. I thought that was it, but decided to run GDB anyway and it worked!! It took a very long time (around 10 hours) to scan, make an image, copy) but it was worth it and I saved all that money that would have gone to data recovery professionals. Thanks a lot!!

Follow up question: This might sound dumb, but after I was done, I decided to delete the image file of the HD that I had saved. I had 6GB of free space with the image file there. After deleting the image file, which was 111GB, I now have only 103GB of free space left on my HD. How can I fix this? A clean up program of some sort, defragment, or what? Thanks!!

[Paul Komski]

GDB scores again - good to know.

You would need to have checked the free space immediately before and after deleting the image file. Anything else could be now occupying some of the space - for example the size of the page file might have changed.

ExplorerXP (http://www.explorerxp.com/) is a good application at showing you just what is occupying various bits of space. Defragging and other utilities will not reclaim space by reorganising where the data is on the disk but deleting hidden files and emptying the recycle bin would of course.