I will second that. SpinRite is awesome and has been around since the 80's (obviously it has been upgraded as HD technology has evolved). It can take a looooooooong time to get things corrected, but if it is correctable - SpinRite is your best option for less than $100.
interesting site i ran across:http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/know...4b1a62a50f405d0d86256756006e340c?OpenDocument Hard Disk Drive Knowledge Base -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Noises that indicate a defective drive. Question
if you have a 40GB Maxtor, DO NOT turn off the machine ! Have a data back up immediately. the clicking sound is the sound of death. Once you turned off the machine, you won't be able to turn it on again. this has been a known problem for a few years.
I remember the impression reading something about putting the drive in the freezer can help reading the data??? If the data is really important, you might need to send it to a pro before messing with it.
when my pc hard disk crashed, someone here recommended 'bart pe' as a recovery solution. it worked for me. its free. do a google - basically it acts like a mini windows os, but runs off the cd that you burn. you can then retrieve data, copy it, connect to the internet etc.
well it allowed me to recover my data when my hard drive failed. guess i must have had a secret squirrel copy!
Greeting, If you drive experience data loss I suppose some tools for data recovery might help. The one thing I've used in a simmilar situation was Boot Disk CD image. That image included recovery tool, really good, among them partition recovery utility and undelete, both can be launched from DOS, one of them can restore partitions, the oter data itself. There are other tools on that image, for data erase and backup, you might also find backup utility worth if your hdd is dying. http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm
when a hard drive stops working the first thing you should do is to replace the controller. you need a new identical HD, precisely the same model. take its controller and put it in the old one. if that doesn't work, start dealing with recovery programs, labs, etc.
Methinks that switching controllers in late model drives ain't that easy. Chances are that you end up with two defective drives instead of one.