Hard drive failure

[pokerjo22]

My hard drive failed and I mistakenly then backed up my reformatted drive over my backup of my drive! [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

I've lost about four years of photos - can anyone recommend any software that could look to see whether they're still on the drive anywhere?

[wacki]

You need to be more specific about how your hard drive failed.

For software file recovery try File Scavenger (cheap) and getdataback (more expensive).

Good luck.

[pokerjo22]

Two hard drives have now failed twice. All four times it has been in the windows sector of the hard drive, requiring a reinstall of windows. I suspect the IDE controller. Thanks for the recommendations.

[wacki]

Ok, that may not be a hard drive failure. That may be a virus, trojan, etc. Have you ran a SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) test? If you have a Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, etc. hard drive you can download a free diagnostic utility from the manufacturers website and use it to check your hard drive. If your hard drive still works (after the failure), your problem may not be the harddrive at all.

If your IDE controller is failing you should see a bunch of errors during bootup/Post. You will see stuff like CRC error, Logical Block Address Out of Range, transfer error, downgrading to Ultra-DMA mode 4........

[pokerjo22]

Well I have firewalls and Symantec Antivirus that updates every night, so I can't imagine its a virus.

The hard drive diagnostics all pass, so it isn't a hard drive fail per se (when I later install it as a slave the hard drive works just fine), but windows somehow gets corrupted.

The only thing I can think of is the IDE controller, but there are no error messages, just a single flashing white cursor in the top left corner of the screen.

[TimM]

I would look for BIOS and driver updates for the motherboard.

Edit: for this I mean after you exhaust your data recovery options and get the system running again, to prevent it in the future. Something is obviously wrong if you are corrupting this many drives without any physical failure.

[wacki]

[ QUOTE ]
Well I have firewalls and Symantec Antivirus that updates every night, so I can't imagine its a virus.

[/ QUOTE ]

Symantec isn't bulletproof.

http://www.pandasoftware.com/press/pcworld/

It could be anything. Spyware can do that and most antivirus programs don't search for spyware. Heck, even poorly written software can do that.

[ QUOTE ]
The hard drive diagnostics all pass

[/ QUOTE ]

Good to see you are on top of things.

[ QUOTE ]
The only thing I can think of is the IDE controller, but there are no error messages, just a single flashing white cursor in the top left corner of the screen.

[/ QUOTE ]

You don't get any kind of text when booting up????

Do you have a Gateway/Dell? Do you see the Dell image?

Would help more, but the phone is ringing and I have to get my butt to the bars. Will check up on you later but there are plenty others here that know this stuff (AngryCola, AncientPC, Astro, TimM, etc).

[sublime]

Hard drive failure

wont happen with me baby

[pokerjo22]

Yeah I see the Dell image, and can get into the BIOS and setup, but after that its white cursor time.

[thirddan]

i got "getdataback" when my drive crashed, and it worked very well...i think it was 80 bucks, but worth it...