Recover Hard Disk Data
 

'cause I'm a dufus, I knocked over my tower PC and apparently killed the disk drive. It now tells me that it can't boot off it.

I used the ultimatebootcd, ran the utility from my drive manufacturer (seagate) and it found one bad sector very early on. i assume this is one of the boot sectors bits, as there were no other problems.

so, i'm confident that i have a hard drive that works fine, apart from one of the boot sectors.


Any ideas on where I can get a bootable CD image that I can use to connect up to my home network and copy the important data off my hard disk? (preferably to my laptop which i have on the same network)

Alternatively, is my line of thinking way off?

Re: Recover Hard Disk Data
 

You could try Spinrite: http://www.grc.com/intro.htm

Re: Recover Hard Disk Data
 

Google 'BartPE'. It will give you instructions on how to create a bootable CD that will let you access your hard drive, even if it's an NTFS drive. Very handy to have in your toolbox.

Re: Recover Hard Disk Data
 

If you have an extra drive that you can back up the non-damaged sectors to (your data), I'd focus on doing that first before you try things that could potentially [censored] up the entire disk.

Re: Recover Hard Disk Data
 

[ QUOTE ]
You could try Spinrite: http://www.grc.com/intro.htm

[/ QUOTE ]

Bingo. Spinrite saved almost 160GB of data on my laptop when the drive crashed and wouldn't boot a few months back. I had everything backed up, so it wasn't the end of the world. However, it didn't just save the data, it repaired the bad sectors and made the drive bootable and like new. I never had to reinstall Windows.

Re: Recover Hard Disk Data
 

An option that I am most used to since I've had a number of OS/drive crashes that I have had to recover from is to use Knoppix, a bootable Linux distro. I recently was swapping out a drive I wanted to reformat and fogot to swap a cable and accidently started to format the wrong drive. I pretty much killed the MBR and made the machine unbootable as well as killing the partition table but I was able to use Knoppix to rebuild the most significant partitions and than use my router to back up my key files on my laptop. If you opt to use it look up info on testdisk and gpart(ed).