Data recovery problem

Hi,

More woes with my WD hard drives. WDC WD5000KS-00MNB0

I have a computer with a 40GB hard drive that is the XP boot disk and a WD 500 GB as a secondary storage disk.

About a week ago XP automatically started to check the 500 GB hard drive.

About 35% into it the power went out (no UPS) and because I was in a hurry when it did come back on I disconnected the drive and did some work.

Today, I wanted to restart that chkdsk process and found out to my dismay that XP will not load (in safe mode or normal) when the 500 GB is connected.

I installed the recovery console option and tried two times to complete the chkdsk operation. I used the /f and /p options.

Eeach time it failed to go past the 25% mark.

The TestDisk program I used before to fix the broken partition works when Windows is operational.

Unfortunately Windows can’t boot with the drive connected and therefore I can’t use the TestDisk Utility to try and recover some data because when Windows does come up the 500 GB hard drive is not connected.

any ideas?

Thanks…

How long did you expect for Windows to load before giving up? Cause it can sometime take over 10-15 minutes for Xp to pass a corrupt disk and load. Then again, sometimes it never loads…

Another thing would be to attempt to connect the 500GB disk after Windows has loaded (not the wisest choise, since it involves making electrical connections while things are on, but SATA is/should be plug-and-play).This also may work or may just lock up your Windows.

This are just two steps you can try beside going into deeper things (SMART / WD Diagnostics tests, bad sectors scans)…

Hi and thanks for the reply.

I waited for about 8 minutes, I think.

Didn’t know SATA was “plug and play” is there an order of cable connect? pwr vs data cable? I’m guessing data cable first since i’ve never attempted that. And, now with the new info you just mentioned, i’m guessing 15 minutes or more or never for the HD to be recognized.

The problem that I don’t understand is why in the Windows Recover function chkdsk can’t get past the 25% mark. I’ve seen that mentioned on the web; seems like that’s the magic fail percentage.

I’ve got seatools a DOS version and a graphic version, plus the WD data life guard tools (didn’t see anything that looked promising on that)

I’m sorry to say I don’t know much about what you mean by SMART / WD Diagnostics, unless that is the seatools.

I was trying to figure out how to use that TestDisk program from a boot option but I’m not sure how that works either.