Simviation Forums

My Dad's computer has suffered a hard drive failure. He said at first the computer started switching itself off. Now it won't show anything. He bought a new drive and it works fine.

Any hope of getting the data back? Some of it was backed up.

Slave the drive, get the data off it, delete the partitions on the drive, initialise, re-partition and format it. It might be just fine. You won't know until you try.

My Dad's computer has suffered a hard drive failure. He said at first the computer started switching itself off. Now it won't show anything. He bought a new drive and it works fine.

Any hope of getting the data back? Some of it was backed up.

If the drive will appear in Windows as a second hard drive you could attempt to get data off of it.

You can also run a full checkdisk on the drive from DOS by booting WindowsXP install disk and selecting the repair console. Log in as administrator (if it asks) and run the following command:

This assumes the old hard drive is D

CHKDSK /R D:\

If it is readable enough to get Windows to recognize it, that command should fix but not if physical or electronic damage is there.

It will also take a while to complete that run... up to an hour if the drive is big (150gb)

There are utilities like  
http://www.recovermyfiles.com/   that you can use to recover some of your data from a failed hard-drive. If it's VERY important data.. there are companies that will actually open up the drive.. taked the disks out and recover any data where the disk wasn't physically damaged or worn out. Those services can run several thousand dollars.

Thanks I'll pass this on.  8)

Sounds more like a PSU issue to me

hook it up on a machine that can read NTFS drives and try to get anything back that you can find