Hard drive may have died - advice needed!

**Tacticalwithdrawal** · July 16, 2007, 08:45 AM

We have building work going on in the house at the moment and they needed to turn off the power. I switched off my PC and then tghe power was cut.

Now the PC won't restart - it gets to the XP 'something has gone wrong at startup' and lets me try to do a safe restart (of various types) or reuse last known good config or just a normal start.

None of these work, I select one and the machine goes to the XP startup screen (the one with the dots moving in the bar at the bottom), and then just returns to the computer restart (as if I had just rebooted).

I have then booted off my XP disk and it can see the hard drive, but is not detecting the fact that it has anything on it (it basically says it has 286GB unasigned and 8GB assigned), no mention of XP.

So, now I think XP can't have been fully shut-down when the power cut happened and it has lost the information on what is on the drive - anyone got any suggestions?

**pannonian** · July 16, 2007, 08:53 AM

If the harddrive is still alive, just seemingly empty, you might be able to recover the data using something like PC Inspector File Recovery. What's probably happened is that the file allocation table has been corrupted or lost, so Windows can't see what's on the drive any more. File recovery programs can rebuild the tables and give you access to the data which is still on the drive.

**Tacticalwithdrawal** · July 16, 2007, 08:54 AM

I'll give PC Inspector File Recovery a shot and let you know what happens

**spartan_phalanx** · July 16, 2007, 11:24 AM

The best would be to take it out and try it in another computer (friends?). The information shouldn't have been erased/deleted in that scenario. You essentially have to write over the data to fully erase it. You could also put in a new drive, install your OS and try to access the drives information that way.

**OTZ** · July 16, 2007, 11:52 AM

Well, you might even want to give resetting the CMOS a try...

**Tacticalwithdrawal** · July 17, 2007, 02:44 AM

ok, situation now is......

I've put in a second hard drive into my machine and installed XP onto it, I can therefore now turn on the machine and look at the original drive.

Basically XP thinks it needs to be formatted so it seems likely it has lost its partition/file registers. Anyone know how to rebuild/repair them?

**sapi** · July 17, 2007, 03:18 AM

Originally Posted by Tacticalwithdrawal

ok, situation now is......

I've put in a second hard drive into my machine and installed XP onto it, I can therefore now turn on the machine and look at the original drive.

Basically XP thinks it needs to be formatted so it seems likely it has lost its partition/file registers. Anyone know how to rebuild/repair them?

Sounds like either the FAT (file allocation table) or MBR (master boot record) is shot. Probably the former, considering that it gives you the option to boot windows.

Have a try running this on it from the working system.

**pannonian** · July 17, 2007, 04:35 AM

Originally Posted by Tacticalwithdrawal

ok, situation now is......

I've put in a second hard drive into my machine and installed XP onto it, I can therefore now turn on the machine and look at the original drive.

Basically XP thinks it needs to be formatted so it seems likely it has lost its partition/file registers. Anyone know how to rebuild/repair them?

The probability is that the file allocation tables are corrupted, so Windows (of whatever flavour) can't read the drive any more. This is where file recovery programs come in. They rebuild those tables so you can access the data in the corrupted drive, which you would be best advised to copy to an uncorrupted drive.

So pick a good file recovery program, put it on your working install, then set it to look at your dodgy drive. Then copy the data you recover to your working drive, backing up to DVD periodically to free up more space.