Data Recovery: Data Loss and Drive Failures

General Error Reading Drive C (Continued)

• If you are running Windows 9x, boot up with a Windows 98SE floppy and at the prompt, type fdisk /mbr
• If you are running Windows 2000/XP, stick your operating system CD in your CD drive and boot from it. You may need to go into the system BIOS to add “CDROM” to the boot sequence. Normally, the sequence should be: Floppy, CDROM, then HDD-0 (or whatever your boot drive happens to be). Boot off the CD and choose Setup, then select Repair. At the prompt, type fixboot and hit enter; then fixmbr and hit enter.
• After you have completed the steps pertaining to your operating system, try rebooting.

Some older computers have a BIOS limitation of 32GB of the size of a partition (or 137GB, in the case of motherboards that are not quite as old). In situations like these, overlay programs, such as EZ-drive, are sometimes used to get around this limitation. In the instance that an overlay gets damaged, the partition information will not be read correctly. It can sometimes be repaired by reinstalling the overlay software that was originally used.

To avoid this BIOS limitation and having to do a drive overlay, PCI IDE/SATA cards run about $20-$50, depending on what you want on them. Promise cards are some of the better and most compatible cards available. An alternative solution can be to just create partition sizes that fall under the limit of the BIOS. Either one of these solutions is preferable to having a drive overlay, which can sometimes be quite problematic.

If the partition tables get corrupted, either a zero fill will need to be performed or one of the repair programs mentioned earlier may solve the problem. A zero fill writes 0’s to the entire drive, turning it into a blank slate. All your data would be erased, yet still possibly recoverable by some data recovery agencies. Yet, if you are planning on taking the drive to a recovery agency, it is best to leave the drive in the state it was found because more data may be recoverable.

If the hard drive sounds like it is spinning up normally, and have tried everything mentioned above and it’s not detected in the BIOS (or detected intermittently), then it’s possible that the chips on the circuit board is overheating, or the whole board has failed entirely. It is sometimes possible to swap the circuit board off of a working identical hard drive in order to access the data on your failed drive. Either that, or try the “freezer trick”. After you have pulled your data, get the drive replaced.

You can try the “freezer trick” if the drive is acting flaky and/or not much else has really been helpful in getting data off the drive. First, let the drive reach about room temperature before proceeding. A sudden change in temperature is not all that healthy for a drive. Afterward, put the drive in a freezer bag (a Ziploc bag will do if there aren’t any freezer bags handy) and squeeze out all the air (leave a little space at the opening of the bag for the air to escape). This is so you avoid condensation while the drive is put into the freezer. Leave it in there for an hour or so. Finally, take it out and slave it to another machine and try to copy over any data you want. This process may need to be repeated a few times in order to copy over everything you need.

What the freezer trick does is cool down all the components of the hard drive. It will cool down the overheating chips on the hard drive’s circuit board (which is a known problem with some models of Maxtor Quantum drives), and as well as allow the platters contract a bit, making it easier for the heads to read the data, thus decreasing read errors. All this “trick” does is buy some time in order to recover your data. In other words, the drive will need to be replaced. If it is still under warranty, RMA it back to the manufacturer.

One more-or-less unconventional last resort to get a hard drive working again is to gently tap the drive on the edge of a table a couple times. It may help in dislodging possible materials sticking to the platters, but slamming it too hard will damage it, and you will be left with a mechanically inoperable hard drive, and can be a very iffy situation to be covered under a warranty.

If all else fails, there is one final, but costly alternative. There are companies that specialize in data recovery off of various media. When these companies encounter a dead hard drive, they open it up in a sealed environment, referred to as a “clean room”, for the slightest speck of dust on the drive platters can cause read/write errors. The platters are then removed from the drive and put in a bench ring where they can be inspected and where (hopefully) data can be extracted. Ontrack and DriveSavers are two companies that has been around for several years that deal with data recovery. Don’t be surprised if the cost of recovering data runs a few thousand dollars. However, if the data is absolutely critical, then it can be worth every penny to get it recovered.

The average hard drive survives about three years (discounting natural disasters and user-initiated drive deaths by way of a hammer). Some drives don’t even make it through the first few months of use, while others keep on running for five years or more. Any manufacturer can have a line of bad drives. No manufacturer is immune to premature drive failure. Every manufacturer has certain models that are more prone to fail than others. To prevent getting into a sticky situation like this, one big way is to avoid buying the “newest and the best” hardware until it has had a month or two to be broken in, and for their problems to be revealed.