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Have two HDD's both with XP Pro installed that came out of PC's that won't boot. Both when taken out and attached to another PC show as RAW with 0 bytes free (completely blue disc) if you left click them it says they need formating.
Have read that TestDisk can recover the partition.
Does anyone know if this works or have any other suggestions.
Thanks in advance as always for all and any help.
Are the machine parts IDENTICAL to each other so the "Drivers" inside XP match perfectly?
Are the drives SATA or PATA/IDE? If IDE are they jumpered as Master ot Slave?
I'm attaching the HDD's to a laptop via an external powered adapter.
One of the HDD's is an IDE the other is a SATA drive.
Have attached other HDD's to the same laptop in the past and been able to read the contents ok.
Backing the truck up a bit...What's the history behind the two machines/drives? Did the get zapped by lightening or anything?
One machine had a virus and spyware causing it to hang on startup would take 30 mins to get past XP splash screen. Ran anti vurus etc but on reboot won't get past the F8 options screen.
The other was working but running slow and believe spybot or similar was run and on reboot came up with message 'no operating system loaded' or similar.
Could not get to boot into safe mode either.
Can you test the external device with a known good HDD. Maybe that's your problem.Quote:
Originally Posted by tpuk57
Have tried with working HDD and is recognised ok.
Am now tying out TestDisc on one of the drives to see if it can recover the partition.
Not sure which virus has caused this if it is a virus bot seems pretty virulent if it is.
If TestDisk doesn't do it, here are some others that you cn try:
PC Inspector
Restoration
TestDisk
Have managed to resuscitate one of the drives using TestDisk to recover the partition. Then having put the drive back into the PC used Windows Recovery Console used Chdsk and fixmbr/fixboot.
PC is now back up and running with all original files intact - also ran a virus scan which picked up 70 infections.
Thanks for everyones help - will mark this resolved providing I can remember how!
Thanks again.