im in a bit of a pickle, after my pc got transported to the uni the hard drives got busted a wee bit and i dunno wut to do. The drives are recogised by the system but the boot wont start them. Is there any way can recover the information on the hard drives coz the IT department can help but only in like 2 weeks time and i need all my stuph by next week

money is not relly an issue at this point coz im gonna save me a lot of time and effort if i can at least recover most of it.

Get on an IM, I have several possibilities. Does disc management recognise the drive and partition?

I have a couple of tools which would be of use failing this. Moral of the story though, you should always remove HDDs for transport, especially if the machine will be leaving your sight or getting handled by a third party. Did you have shipping insurance assuming it was couriered?

yes man it was insured but the recovering the contents is more important to me coz it has my portfolio and all the stuph I need for my studies as well my person infomation.

im sorry what do you mean by IM. coz im using school and frends pc and i cant install anything on them so.......

ps yea disc and partition are recognised

IM = instant messenger

Ok, you might be able to reclaim any costs incurred retrieving this data back from the responsible party.

So to confirm this is the hard disc that your computer usually boots from;

This tells me that you've plugged the disc into another machine or have a spare drive that you can boot from.

What status does disc manager report for the drive?

Can you see the disc in "My Computer"?

If you can access the disc via My Computer, does attempting to do so cause explorer to crash [because it waits endlessly for a response from the drive], or the hard drive light to come on and stay on?

Is the drive making any unusual noises, such as one click per second or sounding like a lathe?

If you want faster answers/solution I could remote control your PC. Or in the interim I have steam/msn/facebook

This is what I'd do.

Buy a new hard drive. They are pretty cheap nowadays.

Install windows. Boot up and hopefully it will see your old drive with all the data on. Sounds like its just got a few bad sectors from the impact of the journey. With any luck most of the data is recoverable and the drive may still be useable after a reformat and error scan.

Another option is to just do a reinstall of windows on it and hopefully the data is alright.
But probably wouldnt wanna put windows or anything important on a drive after having this problem.

Failing that you'll need some special software tools for data recovery and it gets tricky.

Like kinetic said its always a good idea to remove HD's for transporting your PC. I learnt this as a student when going home at the end of each semester , several times! Should have thought of it when you said you were moving, soz man!

erm mate i canyt exactly connect to any other pc noone will let me. geeks at the it department poletely told me to eff off and i dont gots no windows software.

I can get a new drive but how am I supposed to midgrate all the software on it when its doesnt have OS on it?


Also I did ask on tips about transporting and didint get much help from that thread either but thats another story.

uni policy is agaisnt installing new software so kinetic of you have facebook we can IM fro mthere.

so as i understand it i need to get me new drive and find a place to plug the old on in and migrate all the old software on it.

How do I install windows on the new drive tho ? I got win 7 ripped but need to be in as OS to boot an os no ?

Put Win7 disc in drive.

Go to Bios find boot priority /order. Change first device to CDROM. Save and exit.

It will boot up and say 'Press any key to boot from CDROM' .....do that.

and away you go.


You may also want to look here before buying a new drive.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

Although I would seriously consider doing that anyway as the drive may be physically damaged. But repairing the boot record may get it working again for now.

my win7 disc is ON the hard drive if you get my drift

I'm afraid you're a moron Wisty....
Who here doesn't have a copy of Windows on a disc?!

Epic Facepalm

I suppose I could post you the correct version if you let me know which one you would like.

or, if there's someone close to hand with a win7 installation, part 2 of this how-to would give you the system recovery tools as found on the install disc.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/20 ... reate.html

Also at the very bottom are links to the iso's for the full disc, plus instructions to load to a usb drive if it turns out your mobo supports flash drive booting.