Hi guys,

Could somone please advise about recovering data from a corrupted hard drive on a Windows XP Home Edition computer?
My HD went down over a week ago and I have now installed a new drive as my system drive and am running the old one as a secondary slave drive.
I want to get as much data as possible from the old drive but don't know which data recovery software to use - there seems to be a lot of choice out there.
Can anyone please advise...
TIA

Regards,
Alan

Hi Alan, welcome to itsallPC

What exactly do you mean by "corrupted"? This is one of those words like "download" that is very overused, often incorrectly, because it sounds computerish.

Typically, there's a difference between say a collapsed partition table and a corrupt file system, although they probably look exactly the same to most people. If you're not really sure, you might try explaining the events that lead to the failure of the drive and what you did to try and fix it. All of this plays a big part in whether or not you can retrieve data and how to go about doing it.

Hi Syphus and thanks for the welcome!

Ok, here goes, I'll try to explain as best I can.

My computer (4.5 years old) had until a few days ago a single 120 gig drive running Windows XP Home. A couple of weeks ago while I was using it, it started running a bit slow and I think from memory a dialogue box to do with the disk drive popped up. I restarted and various strange things happened so I restarted again. It did restart but was still acting extremely strangely and was virtually unusable. I restarted again and this time the following message showed in the DOS-like screen that appeared instead of Windows (please forgive my appalling lack of knowledge of terminology and virtually everything else!!):

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

WINDOWS ROOT>\ SYSTEM 32\HAL.DLL

Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I called a helpline and the person there suggested running CHKDSK which I did. A message then appeared that said:

The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.

When I next tried to boot I got the following message:

WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

I then installed a new 80 gig drive and re-installed windows, service pack 2, windows updates and a few drivers. I then powered up the old drive with appropriate jumpers for it to be the slave to my new drive.

I managed to copy quite a few folders and files onto my new drive by dragging and dropping and copying and pasting. Then that wouldn't work any more so I restarted. CHKDSK automatically started (blue screen that looks like a simplified form of XP). I let it run and went to bed (last night) - I don't know how long it ran for.

This morning I restarted the computer and once again still got the WARNING as above (press F1 to continue). I double clicked on the drive icon (F drive) and could see no files at all - it looked like a completely empty drive!

I hope that gives you a picture of what has happened so far - I have tried to remember as much as I can although there are probably a few details that are not completely accurate.

Cheers,

Alan

Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS data recovery software. Its a file and partition recovery utility which recovers data from formated hard drive, software malfuntion etc.
It also Provides partition recovery from FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS and NTFS5 file system.
Download the demo of this partition recovery utility.
Run the software and see if the demo shows you the recovered data. If it is then save the data by getting the full version.

What make of hard drive is it? We are seeing a lot of WD hard drives at our Data Recovery company. Let me know and I will ask my data recovery technicians to give you as accurate answer as possible.

Regards,

Simon