Greetings, I've this Western Digital 120gb HD which I feel now is just a big chunk of metal! It all started when I was getting blue screens (i felt it came due to contnious power failure which resulted in powering down the pc without proper shutdown) on my XP.. Temporary fix was by running chkdsk from recovery console or adding it as a slave to another pc and runnign chkdsk/r... The diagonistic utility from western digital gave me an Error code, which meant that there are too many errors and the support team has asked me to backup my data and send back the HD for replacement! Even after their warning, I kept running chkdsk and using the same HD as I was short of funds to get a new HD to back my data! Just two days before, I ran chkdsk /r (i usally run chkdsk/f) and to my suprise it took nearly a whole night to finish the process. But it wasnt successful, it said no space to save bad clusters! So I thaught this is about time I look in to backing my stuff using some kind of recovery tool! Below are the following I tried: Ontrack DataRecovery, PC Inspector File Recovery, Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS, Runtime Diskexplorer for NTFS. I started with Ontrack and cancelled the process within 10 min due to the long estimated finish time (something liek 72 hours). Then I tried stellar, which also interrupted by me couple of times to check how good is the recovery. Finally, I left Stellar running yesterday and too my suprise I recovered blank bolder (some million of them). When I ran Runtime Diskexplorer for NTFS, i tried to view the contents of the HD in text and I found some text that said, NTLDR is screwed press ctrl+del to reboot.. I guess thats the message I get if i boot from the HD? Anyways, I've delayed any recovery process due to the non-avilability of a backup drive. Now when the computer boots, the HD is detected... but win xp failed to load completely. But the HD works when I connect to an another system to run the WD diagonistic tool, which is in DOS Here is my question, is it possible to recover this drive at all?! If so, are there any dos utilities that can do the job? Currently I'm reading up on TestDisk Also, if i do a quick format, I feel that my HD will be detected by windows? then i can run Ontrack to recover my files? is that possible? Pls, any help is very much appreciated!!
