Hard drive now crashes windows? any way to get data back?

Dazultra2000 · May 18, 2005

I had a massive system blowout and several of my components got fried.

I had a 200GB SATA Maxtor Drive (6Y00L0 or something) onto which I had filled up with plenty of data, including my windows install.

When it happened, I rebooted and it reported my registry had been destroyed, however, loading the windows recovery console crashed the machine and caused it to reboot.

So I decided to reinstall windows on my other IDE drive and try to retrieve my data that way...although any time the drive was accessed, it'd reboot the machine again. That meant that I couldn't get into the new windows install. Unplug the drive and it's fine.

I did briefly see an error in ntfs.sys...but it rebooted before I could see it.

I just want to get that data back off the drive - any ideas?

theefool · May 18, 2005

When you said several components got fried, which components were they? Are you using the same motherboard with this other PATA drive?

I'd hook that SATA drive to a seperate computer to retrieve that data.

jmmijo · May 18, 2005

I concur, it's best to install that SATA drive into a new or a known working box and attempt a data recovery that way.

That being said, there is a chance that the filesystem on that drive is corrupted enough to cause the error and reboot issue you described as well.

If this is the case you may need to connect that SATA drive up to a third party controller card instead of the onboard SATA.

Some of the higher end boards come with a third party SATA, like those from Promise or Silicon Image, on the motherboard as well, this should work as a sub to a PCI expansion card as well.

Another option is to use a data recovery tool, I personally have used R Studio and I swear by it