Rescue a crashed HDD?

[Fascix]

Okey my trouble is this:

My brand new 200Gb SATA drive is F-Uped.

Bios and Windows XP finds the drive and i get as far as browsing the root of the drive where i can see the catalougs but if i try to access one of them the system crashes. (i got in to one of the maps once and it showed up as empty.)

The thing is i have had this exact same problem some time ago with another drive, but then i tried to format the drive, but that didnt work!? the format proccess stoped after like 52% or something. and i havent got it back to life.

So my question is:

1.) can i somehow get the files back from my 200Gb drive

2.) Is there anyway to then get the 200Gb drive (and maby the other one) back to life again?

as i sit here typing i come to think of low-level format... could that be something?

well ill be more than happy to give you more info if you want/need it in order to help me out

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Info: It is a 200Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA drive, the drive makes some kind of repeating buzz klicking noise almoast like the sound the hard drive makes when you shut down the computer, like something mechanical is wrong, i haven´t messed with the drive from outside the computer though so its strange how this could happend.

second drive is a 80Gb seagate Barracuda IDE no strange sounds, just f-ups when i try to format it (message saying "unabel to complete the format" or something like that) i think i saw a message saying that the drive has damage cluster, dont remember if it was in Checkdisk or in some Norton based utility or in some defragger i saw the message.

i also have a WD Raptor 36Gb SATA drive that has this problems.

this drive is odd. its an old drive i had Windows XP on (its still there) and when i connect this drive as master it will boot up and get in to windows and then after a various amount of time (differ from 1min to 10min) the computer will hang.

if i then try to set it as slave and boot up to WinXP with my regular drive, the computer will hang after 1 to 10 minutes, if i remove the drive compleatly from the computer everything works fine.

Thanx ppl

Edited August 25, 2005 by Fascix

[cheezus420]

Low level format is done by the maufacturer... I think??? You can try getting yourself a disk to boot off of, or something that will let you access the c:\ drive. Then maybe hook up another slave drive and try to transfer data between the two. Just an idea, not sure if it will work

[Tarun]

Spinrite, worth every penny.

[cheezus420]

Spinrite, worth every penny.

How does this work... is it bootable, or do you have to be in windows for it to work???

[Fascix]

well my crashed 200Gb drive is a "standalone" drive, meaning i dont have the OS on that drive its just a drive with music and pictures some importand documents and ofcourse my whole Unattended WinXp Projects and lots of other stuff including a raw DV copy from my 6 months travel to south-east asia... i would REALLY love to have that back!

well anyways as i said i have no problem accessing the computer (as you can see right now)

And also i think i did a low-level format on a drive years ago from my bios??? was a long time ago on a old computer, or was it by F-Disk??? hmm i can´t remember!

[Fascix]

Low level format is done by the maufacturer... I think???   

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

yor right, Your hard drive will NOT let you LLF it. However, many utils, including some ones from hard drive makers _improperly_ call their zero fill utils LLF [Low Level Format] utilities.

ie YOU cant LLF format a modern drive. YOU can, however, zero fill it and bring it back to a factory fresh state. In this case all data is overwritten with zeros or ones.

A Low level Format (physical format) creates the tracks and sectors on a Hard Disk. It is done at the factory.

You cannot do this on newer drives from your PC. Older MFM drives can be Low level formatted from your PC.

High level format (the format command in dos and windows) is a logical formatting that creates the data structures for the disk.

Edited August 25, 2005 by Fascix