Hard drive causing blue screen o' death...

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Fatbat

Fatbat

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May 10, 2008
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I have 3 towers in my office here. The other night there was some sort of power surge/failure and when I went to reboot all three, one kept having a blue screen of death after the XP load screen. It would restart and blue screen again, and repeat.

In this machine are two drives, a 200gb on which the OS and programs run, and a 750gb I use primarily for music and movie storage.

I pulled the 750gb and the computer booted fine. I plugged it back in and it crashed the machine.

I put it in an external USB enclosure, which when plugged in is recognized as a mass storage device, then the drive is recognized, then the PC blue screens out.

I tried plugging it into two different machines and they both blue screened once they recognize the drive.

Any ideas on how to recover this drive? It has a good ten years of my music "collecting" on it which I would really like to try to save. I'm an idiot for not having it backed up.

Either way I think I'm going to grab 2 of these "green" WD Caviar 1TB drives and do a raid for my media.

Any help would be much appreciated!
 


I don't know about fixing your drive but aside from a back up you should consider getting a UPS as well since in this case it would have most likely saved your drive.

For future if you want an easy back up solution check out Acronis.
 
Linux for the save! Yes it's probably doable, assuming the hard drive still works.

If it doesn't work, there are places that can re-build your hard drive and try and recover the data, prices aren't that cheap, but for what it's worth.
 
Have you tried booting with both drives to safe mode or command prompt only? I had a similar issue, after a power outage the volume label on my second hard drive became this weird mess of characters that apparently would crash explorer, changing the label from the command prompt made XP happy again.
 
Good suggestions above. I'm not really a mac guy, but if none of the above work try putting it back in your usb enclosure and boot to OSX if you can get your hands on a mac, then plug the drive in.
 
Do a smart diagnostic. Make sure the drive itself is not failing. I learned this the hard way.
 
I would try Spinrite, but it is not free. Maybe after that Hirens thing. I have seen Spinrite fix amazingly dead harddrives.
 
Fatbat said:
No, it's actually a pretty new sata drive.

Thanks for all the suggestions folks, I will try a few of them in the am. Right now my head hurts to much to think :)

Happy New Year!
Click to expand...

If your system is not detecting the drive, the electronic circuit board on the drive may have shorted out.

As the drive is pretty new you may be able to buy one and change the board on the drive. In order to do this, you'll need someone that is good with electronics.
 
If all fails, you could also try Knopixx which is a bootable Linux CD. I once recovered an entire RAID5 Exchange database using that. You can google it and then download the ISO image. It's relatively simple yet pretty powerful. Your worse case scenario is to go to one of the data recovery places but that will cost you a pretty penny.
 
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