Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

unbootable hard drive: data recovery

Jan 27, 2006 4:06AM PST

Hi,

Ok...BIG problem!...

The other day my computer crashed during log off. When I turned it on again, i ended up with a blue screen saying 'unbootable boot volume' . I guess at this point i should have sent it to a technician!...anyway i found a number of forum posts with the same problem and followed the instructions to do 'chkdsk' from MS DOS. This looked to be doing stuff.... but now... instead of a blue screen I get nothing...the screen just goes blank!

I ran a diagnostic on the hard drive and got the following:

Error Code: 0F00:0244
Msg: Block 6639579: uncorrectable data error or media write protected

this sounds bad!!

Anyway...I phoned DELL who sent me a new Hard Drive but i'm still trying to recouver the data from my old one. I've tried the 'dir' command and get an error message. The computer is now with someone else trying to recouver the data (but after 3 days i'm loosing faith)

Any help would be really appreciated!

Thanks

Chris

ps. i've learnt my lesson and an external hard drive is already on order to back stuff up in future!

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Knoppix
Jan 27, 2006 6:08AM PST

I'd look into using a Knoppix or any other Linux LiveCD distribution to try and get at the data on the drive. Since the entire operating system boots and runs off the CD, it doesn't matter if there's a hard drive in the system or not. You should be able to mount the drive and assess the damage. If it's formatted as NTFS you'll have read-only support and that's it, but it should be plenty to burn important data to CD using the supplied program K3B.

- Collapse -
As Joe_Smith said, boot from a Linux CD or DVD
Dec 13, 2013 12:19AM PST

Probably better than burning a disc with your data would be to copy it to a flash drive or external hard drive because that's faster, holds much more data, and is more reliable. If you don't have a Linux disc, you can download it from ubuntu.com/download, then burn it to a DVD which you can then boot from. It will give you a desktop similar to the Windows one that you can use for recovering your data. You don't have to install Ubuntu (Linux), just boot from the DVD and it will be up in running in about 3 minutes.
`
I guess you're aware that MS is pulling the plug on the last remnants of support for XP come April.
`
Good luck.