Help Techies! Can this hard drive be saved?

[Catshrink]

When I came home from work on Wednesday, I switched on my computer and went to walk the dog. When I returned, I saw the blue screen of death and scrolling files -- with a "deleting index" prefix on each of them. I turned the machine off and was unable to boot to anything until I put a Norton CD into the computer. Then I was able to boot into NAV and scan. It scanned for 24 hours and found nothing.

I was able to get into the settings and tell the computer to boot from the CD automatically but this did nothing useful. CMOS recognizes both of my hard drives but from a DOS prompt I can't get to the larger drive that has my OS on it. My old HD, which was E, is now called C.

I reset the boot drive to C, which is the old and smaller drive, and repaired the old Win98 on it (the large main drive is a 40gb with WinXP Pro). I couldn't see the large drive through Windoze My Computer.

I pulled out the WinXP Pro CD and started to load that on the current C, the smaller drive. I was thinking that once I got that installed I could somehow repair the big drive. When the machine rebooted, it asked where I wanted to load WinXP.

And this is my question (finally): The choice is to load WinXP on te small drive or to reformat the big drive and load WinXP on that drive, where it was before. Of course, if I format the drive, I wipe it out. I did a backup of my files two weeks ago (or so) but didn't do my quicken or outlook pst file or a couple other files I created since then.

Can I rescue the big drive? Or am I dead meat? Should I just reformat and start over?

Thanks!

[aePrime]

1. If you know any local geeks

you may want to see if they can see the drive with a Knoppix Linux CD. It's a Live CD, meaning that it will run Linux without installing it to the hard drive. I have heard of people using this to save files on dying hard drives when they can no longer boot into Windows.

If you don't know Linux, or don't know any Linux geeks, this may not be worth the effort, but it's what I would try. I can think of no way for you to boot into Windows.

[Catshrink]

2. Thanks! That's worth a try.

I'll need to make some calls tomorrow to find someone with that disk. I thought sure I was sunk!

[aePrime]

3. No guarantees

And Knoppix can be downloaded for free -- www.knoppix.org. It's really just a matter of being comfortable enough with Linux to get the files though.

Good luck! :)

[yowzayowzayowza]

4. If you...

can configure the bios to boot off of the small drive, you should be able to install XP on it *should* remount the big drive automatically.

[Catshrink]

5. Even if the indexes are deleted?

It looks like it lost its formatting.

[yowzayowzayowza]

7. Yea, they should rebuild.

If it did reformat you may need s/w to "unformat" er havta pay someone to take it apart and read whateverz there... been both routes before with mixed success... really depends on the cause... if itz a head crash yer gunna lose mosta that platter and whatever it referred too but the other platters may be ok.

[Az]

6. Sounds like a head crash

Basically the read/write head made contact with the drive surface. Its the equivalent of flying the Concord at tree level and making a little dip. Not going to be good for the drive surface or the r/w head.

If this is what happened the drive is most likely toast. Even reformating will not be a good idea as a huge portion of the surface is scratched and the r/w heads may be damaged.