Dead HDD

[Spartak@CPH]

Right my HDD died over the weekend. I booted into windows there was a missing DLL and when I rebooted I got the dreaded Boot Disk Failure message.

Dug out the old WIN2K disk and tried to repair - no dice.

Bought new HDD and reinstalled windows. The BIOS recognises the old HDD - (which ios now a slave) as does device manager but there is no sign of it otherwise in Windows. The setup utility for the new HDD (Same make) can't find a partition table on there and offers to format. Eek, no thanks just yet.

So, I'm guessing either the Master boot record is fucked or the Partition table is fucked. Presumably the latter means the drive is dead. How can I tell which is which to decide whether I spend the next few years trying to extract the data from ths disk or just bin it and move on?

[Spartak@CPH]

Update - managed to transfer an MBR onto the drive before I left for work so the thing is niow recognised by windows and has a drive letter but the bloody thing is showing as unformatted.

Does anyoen know any way to fix this?

[Gary]

Jut wondering if it was a Seagate or Maxtor.

(Not that it helps you.)

Isn't there some decent tools you can download from the Web to check your system, and specifically the hard drive situation ?

Better still doesn't the manufacturer supply such tools ?

[Spartak@CPH]

Maxtor

Probably - what tools?

No

[Gary]

Just thinking out loud - result of google search, may find something there. (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-20%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=PC+check+hard+disk+download)

Just that in the past I've bought (!) umpteen lots of system check stuff. they go out of date though.

[Gary]

Why not try it on a different PC, see if it's a disk or an OS problem ?

If it's a disk read problem, I use SpinRite on mine. Does quite well, although it won't help if it's a driver problem (or link, or cable problem) of course.

[Nav]

I bought a piece of software called 'Get Data Back' that can recover data from corrupted drives. There are NTFS and FAT32 versions, just google it.

[Spartak@CPH]

Cool.

[Gary]

runtime.org seems to have some interesting apps.

[Spartak@CPH]

I have the drive restored now - handly little utility called testdisk

Thanks everyone for the help.