Seagate 300 gig IDE drive seen as unformatted

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Zaphod wrote:
On Mar 21, 2:51?pm, Daniel Prince wrote:
I have a Seagate 300 gig IDE drive (not SATA) that I have been using
as a data drive. ?Windows XP Home SP3 now says that the drive is
unformatted. ?When I run the Seagate DiscWizard program it says that
sector 92 is unreadable.

I have a lot of data on the drive that I have not backed up. ?I
suspect that most of the data is still there but just not accessible
through Windows. ?Is there a good freeware or shareware program that
I can use to access my data? ?Thank you in advance for all replies.
--
Whenever I hear or think of the song "Great green gobs of greasy
grimey gopher guts" I imagine my cat saying; "That sounds REALLY,
REALLY good. ?I'll have some of that!"

As far as freeware goes, I have no idea of a solution, but Steve
Gibsons Spinrite can recover damaged sectors if they can be recovered
at all.

As can the HDD entirely by itself. Don't waste money on
historical technology. Incidentially, if the HDD needs
hardware repair, SpinRite does not help either.

Arno

--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

From: "Arno"

| In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Zaphod wrote:
On Mar 21, 2:51?pm, Daniel Prince wrote:
I have a Seagate 300 gig IDE drive (not SATA) that I have been using
as a data drive. ?Windows XP Home SP3 now says that the drive is
unformatted. ?When I run the Seagate DiscWizard program it says that
sector 92 is unreadable.

I have a lot of data on the drive that I have not backed up. ?I
suspect that most of the data is still there but just not accessible
through Windows. ?Is there a good freeware or shareware program that
I can use to access my data? ?Thank you in advance for all replies.
--
Whenever I hear or think of the song "Great green gobs of greasy
grimey gopher guts" I imagine my cat saying; "That sounds REALLY,
REALLY good. ?I'll have some of that!"

As far as freeware goes, I have no idea of a solution, but Steve
Gibsons Spinrite can recover damaged sectors if they can be recovered
at all.

| As can the HDD entirely by itself. Don't waste money on
| historical technology. Incidentially, if the HDD needs
| hardware repair, SpinRite does not help either.

| Arno

SeaGate SeaTools can or at least indicate if it is bad.

--
Dave
http://www.claymania.com/removal-trojan-adware.html
Multi-AV - http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp

On Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:51:10 -0700, Daniel Prince
put finger to keyboard and composed:

I have a Seagate 300 gig IDE drive (not SATA) that I have been using
as a data drive. Windows XP Home SP3 now says that the drive is
unformatted. When I run the Seagate DiscWizard program it says that
sector 92 is unreadable.

I have a lot of data on the drive that I have not backed up. I
suspect that most of the data is still there but just not accessible
through Windows. Is there a good freeware or shareware program that
I can use to access my data? Thank you in advance for all replies.

I would clone your drive and then work on the clone.

In cases where the drive has bad sectors, you could use multi-pass
cloning software such as ddrescue. It clones the easy sectors on the
first pass, and difficult sectors on subsequent passes.

Before allowing any data recovery software to work on your data, I
would first use Microsoft's Sector Inspector to view the partition
table and boot sector:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat
file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which
you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine
it.

Here are "Top 10 FREE Data Recovery Software":
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/...very-software/

.... and a few mo
http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/...-p/16201#M1008

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.

Hi!

SMART - FAIL 3/21/2010 1:18:43 AM
Short DST - FAIL 3/21/2010 1:19:23 AM
Long DST - FAIL 3/21/2010 1:20:58 AM

Uh, well, you've got a problem. And given that SMART has finally decided
that the drive has a problem, it's very likely that you have a really BIG
problem at this point.

SMART works on the idea that a drive has some "leeway"...it can have some
problems and still be fine. But if it has enough of the same problem occur
repeatedly, it will eventually enter the threshold where the drive is
considered "bad". Only at this point, the drive is probably really bad.

If you're watching SMART values and see them decline, that can be good
information, and in that case, you would get an advance warning. By the time
SMART tells you something is wrong, it is usually too late.

You can try using a live Linux CD or some sort of recovery tool, but this
drive is way past even borrowed time at this point.

Power-On Hours: 363159

Something is not right here. If that were really an hours measurement, you
would have been using this drive for the past 41 and 1/2 years! Either that
measurement isn't in hours (some drives use minutes) or something
is...ah...really wrong here.

William