Crashed hard disk ... please advise

Dear Group,

I was running the defragmentation utility within Win XP and it has managed to crash my hard disk. I have installed a new disk with a fresh copy of Win XP and I would like your advice as to how best to try and salvage some very critical image files from the damaged hard disk.

I have a USB cable with mini-box which allows me to install an external disk to my laptop and I have already set it up with the damaged disk. The good thing is that the damaged drive is recognized as "Drive E:" but it shows 0 bytes in use. Earlier in the day at a friend's place where we installed the new disk, precisely the same setup (with the external disk) did confirm my 35 Gb of programs and image files. My only concern is the 1-2 Gb of image files and email correspondence.

I know there is a lot of computer experience on this board (fellow hackers) and I was wondering if someone has any specific advice as to how best to tackle this problem.

I am told the SpinRite software is the bes t solution out there. Any and all advice would be very much appreciated!

I think you've already got the best advice I can give, SpinRite. I've never had to use it myself (*touches wood*) but I've never heard anyone say a bad word about it and I've heard loads of people sing it's praises. Good luck with it!

Bart.

Anthony,
Although I have never heard of SpinRite I do know that ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) software does work. I somehow scrambled a 250GB hard drive last year and managed to recover everyone of my photos (and lots of files I thought I had long deleted!) with the software. It took time but worked. Not only that but after recovering the files I reformatted the drive after testing it's integrity with the manufacturers disk software and am still using it with no further problems to this day.
It also has a nifty little piece of software with it which recovers photos from flash drives and cards. This was the reason I took an interest in it in the first place.

It's available at www.z-a-recovery.com/

Best of luck,
Brian

Bart/Brian,

A huge thanks for the feedback. I just downloaded ZAR and I am eager to see how it does.

It took time but worked.

Beggars can't be choosers at an old friend used to tell me.

Hi Anthony,

Sorry to hear M$ Windows crashed , I would urge caution depending on your IT skills and simply say if the information is valuable to you why try and fix it yourself, spend a few quid and get it done professionally. This of course depends on your IT skills but if you have any doubt go to a professional otherwise you might make a bad situation worse :shock:

Would now be a good time to introduce you to Linux?

I've been there before so believe me when I say I wish you the best of luck with the recovery.