Laptop Hard Drive Major problem - Urgent help needed!!

[rsb75]

Hi All,

I am hoping against hope that someone can assist me.

I have an Acer laptop with a seagate hard drive. The laptop was having major problems starting - it would just about boot up in safe mode but I couldn’t access the data on my hard drive as it windows would crash as soon as it started. So I took out the hard drive and connected it to a desktop pc using an akasa external enclosure. Once connected it was registering as usb mass storage but not as a hard drive that I could access.

The system asked if I wanted to initialise the disk and I said ‘yes’. A second later its initialised and although I cant access it I can see it in 'computer management' under 'disk management'. It didn’t format the drive, but I still cannot access the data on that hard drive. Even when I put the drive back in the laptop its not being recognised. Can anyone please help as I have some data on there that I need to access urgently.

Thanks Guys

 

[frozenlead]

Download the Ultimate Boot Disk and run a hard disk diagnostic on it. Does the BIOS detect the drive?

http/www.ultimatebootcd.com/

 

[rsb75]

When i try to boot with the ultimate boot disk it does not recognise it at all ?

 

[frozenlead]

Is the disk recognized in your BIOS?

 

[rsb75]

I started the laptop and pressed f2 . By going to Boot Priority I can see 'ide 0: ST9120821A' Which I assume is that hard drive?

Any help is greatly apprecaited - am at a loss as to what to do to get data back

 

[dwellman]

Oh. The initialize disk wizard appears when windows does not detect a partition table on a basic disk or it detected a foriegn dynamic disk (unlikely). To recover properly you're going to have to uninitialize the disk and run a READ ONLY ( I said READ ONLY) disk forensic utility to see if there's any recoverable data.

It's most likely that the disk is logically or physically damaged.

 

[rsb75]

Hi again,

Forgive me for my lack of knowledge . But can i ask how i can unitialize the disk. Do i connect the laptop drive back up in the external enclusre I have ? The laptop would boot up to windows in safe mode and then crash (when the hd was in the laptop) - its just when i took it out and tried to hook it up to the desktop pc to copy across data that it was not being recognised.

And also is there any disk forensic utility you know that is good and simple to use?

Thanks guys

R

 

[frozenlead]

If you took it out and hooked it up to a desktop and that didn't work, connecting it to a USB converter interface (like those in external hard disk enclosures) shouldn't make any difference.

That boot disk CD has lots and lots of disk utilities for all sorts of things.