Olivas
8 Jun 2004, 6:00pm
Here is the situation. I'm working on this laptop for a friend. It is a Gateway laptop running Windows 2000, with the hard drive formatted for NTFS. Over this past weekend he said is started making some funny noises, like to hard drive heads hitting the platter. Now when you try and boot it up it gets to Windows loading screen and then restarts. I've downloaded and started playing around with the Emergency Boot CD listed in the downloads section, but have had little luck so far. I ran the Drive Fitness Utility Advanced Test and it comes back saying there are bad sectors. I tried repair them and get a message saying it can't because they are system sectors. It suggests to erase the entire disk, but I can't do that because my friend needs the data on there and of course doesn't have a backup. So I'm in need of some suggestions. The drive is recognized by the BIOS still, but I can't seem to get anykind of access to it. I also tried the Win98 boot disk just to see if I could access it that way and I couldn't, but then it dawned on me that Win98 doesn't support NTFS so I probably could do it that way. Are there any good command line based utilities that could repair the damaged sectors with losing all that data. Right now my next step is to call Gateway and find out if there is still a warranty on the drive and if that warranty covers data recovery on failed hard drives.