Retrieve Files from Bad Hard Drive

tgxiii · August 21st, 2004, 04:13 AM

This system has two physical hard drives, one 40GB Maxtor IDE with two partitions (10GB for Windows and 30GB for everything else) and one Hitachi Deskstar 60GB IDE. A few days ago Windows XP Pro stopped loading. It would reach the screen that says "Windows XP Professional" with the animated loading bar. But after a while I would get a BSOD for about a split second and it would restart.

I put the Maxtor as a slave on another computer to see if there was really something wrong. When I try to browse through the 10GB partition with Windows in it I get a message: "Drive is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?" However, I can still browse the 30GB partition.

Is there any way I can retrieve some documents on the 10GB partition?

mingyu01 · August 21st, 2004, 04:15 AM

what windows version is it? WIndows Xp? NT? 2000? 9x?

tgxiii · August 21st, 2004, 04:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tgxiii

A few days ago Windows XP Pro stopped loading. It would reach the screen that says "Windows XP Professional" with the animated loading bar.

mingyu01 · August 21st, 2004, 04:29 AM

i am sorry but i meant to ask you what verson it is on your maxtor but you can always use repair installation on winxp pro. Just boot it up with your setup cd
and do repair on the sceond screen

tgxiii · August 21st, 2004, 04:59 AM

I just thought of doing that after I posted. The Windows XP Pro installation detected the partition as "Unknown." It didn't even give me an option to repair the installation or leave the partition as it is. The only options I got were to format the drive.

sechs · August 21st, 2004, 01:53 PM

At the very least, your partition table is bad. I'd first check to see that the drive is good using Maxtor's utilities. Then, you can try to repair the partition table.