From: "Gary Neal"
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 2:44 PM
Subject: [OT]: Fix a dead harddrive?

<snip>
>         Anyway, does anyone have a clue what to try?  Since I swapped
everything,
> I can't figure out what's wrong.  Is there something you have to do to
make
> the new head unit recognize a new set of platters?

I'm no expert...but it sounds like the Master Boot Sector is garbaged up. If
you can just reformat that, it should work again......BUT, it will most
likely format your File Allocation Table and you will not be able to read
anything on the drive anyway. Reformatting the MBS shouldn't touch the file
data if you do it right....so then how do you get at the data?... Well,
software exists out there that is designed to scan you corrupt harddrive for
files, without knowing exactly where they start. Just look for Data Recovery
software. You'll obviously have to run it on a good harddrive, and have the
bad one set up as a secondary master...or something like that.

If the files on your harddrive are very VERY important....I wouldn't even
mess with it yourself. Just bring it to a Data Recovery specialist. I don't
know where you could find one, but they're out there. Expect to pay an arm
and a leg though....they count on the fact that you'd almost *kill* for the
data.

Either way, Good luck! Crashed harddrives are a b*tch.

-Brett

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics
(like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics