Hello researchers. A couple of weeks ago I had a fatal hard drive
crash on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. It sounded like a lawn mower
and then when I tried to reboot it, it said there was no bootable disk
(ouch). I had not done a backup in quite a while and I have quite a
bit of data on this that I would like to recover. Professional
recovery companies have quoted me $1500 which is a little out of my
price range. I received a new hard drive from Dell and have been using
that.

I also just purchased a Lacie Firewire external 120GB hard drive so
that I can make a full system back up so this doesn't happen in the
future. I was hoping that I could load Windows on this and use it as a
boot up disk and dig into my hard drive but that does not seem to be
an option in the windows F2 setup controls. I guess maybe you need
windows running to use anything on the firewire port? I don't think I
can swap out my hard drive while windows is booted up and put the old
one in. At least I am reluctant to try for fear of damage unless I
receive good advice otherwise.

My question is, what can I do to boot up with my damaged hard drive in
the bay so that I can try to look at its contents and hopefully copy
them into my new external hard drive? Is there a way to make a
bootable CD that will stil allow me to access my damaged hard dirve
and the firewire hard drive? Is there any other way you can think of
to retrieve my data assuming it is retrievable? There is quite a bit
of it and it would definitely not fit on floppies. I do have a program
called Ontrack easy recovery which may help if I can get in a bootable
mode with my damaged hard drive in place.

Thanks for any help.

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Clarification of Question by shiva777-ga on 14 May 2003 13:35 PDT

ps. I am using Windows XP Pro.

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 14 May 2003 14:48 PDT

shiva777...

First...you *cannot* swap out your hard drives with 
Windows booted up! And, yes, you need Windows to be
booted up to access anything on the firewire port.

I don't own a laptop PC, but I'm betting they don't have 
a secondary IDE controller, and I don't know that the primary
IDE controller is capable of accepting a master/slave
configuration of hard drives as it is in a desktop or tower
PC. If the IDE controller is capable of this, you could just
get a cable with two connectors and slave the crashed drive
to your good one, making sure to set the jumper pins on the
drives to reflect 'master' and 'slave'. This would let you
run OnTrack's Easy Recovery program, which, I can tell you
from experience is a good bet for an inexpensive option.

One way to see if your system supports slaved drives is
to look in the BIOS on bootup, and see if 'secondary drive'
is listed on the main page. If it is, then you should be
able to slave the crashed drive using a two-connector cable.
At least, that's how it's done with a desktop.

If slaving is not an option on your notebook, I would
look into ways to slave your crashed drive onto a friend's
desktop - though I'm not sure if there are cables to 
connect a laptop drive to a desktop PC. If this is 
possible, then I would install Ontrack FixIt Utilities
on your friend's machine and proceed with recovery from
there.

The Knoppix CD may let you access your files, but I'm
not sure where you could save them to, unless it 
recognizes your firewire drive and lets you copy them
there. Even so, it will not allow for the recovery
options you have in the Ontrack software.

Let me know where this takes you...

sublime1-ga

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Clarification of Question by shiva777-ga on 15 May 2003 18:42 PDT

Thanks for the help so far. I've gotten Knoppix to boot up, but
unfortunately it did not recognize the firewire drive. I am hoping
that there is  some way to get it to....I've posted on the knoppix
forums. Will keep you updated. Thanks for the lead. If I can get this
to work and it solves the problem I will definitely accept it as an
answer. As far as getting the hard drive hooked up to a desktop, I was
told by a pro that that was a no-go. He took one look at the hook up
on my little lap top hard drive and said no way!

-john

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Clarification of Question by shiva777-ga on 30 May 2003 06:19 PDT

Maniac and Aramithea, I am happy to say that you have proven wrong. I
used a Knoppix CD and successfully retrieved my files using a USB Zip
drive. Yeah!

Sublime or Seizer...you both suggested Knoppix so whoever would like
to claim the prize post an answer. I guess whoever gets there first
wins. You don't have to write anything up because the problem has been
solved. Thank you thank you thank you!!!
-shiva777

Shiva...

I'm very happy with your success in utilizing Knoppix
to regain your files. I was able to contact seizer-ga,
and he said that I should post the answer.

Congratulations!

Me Happy!

Hi Shiva!

Based on your description of the lawnmower noise, I'd be rather
dubious about recovering any data yourself. I've seen a couple of hard
drives die, and  when they go, they really go!

However, you could try using Knoppix, an operating system based on
Linux, which boots from a CD and requires no hard drive. It's a 695mb
download, but it's known to work on your laptop model, can read FAT32
and NTFS Windows partitions, and even has some support for Firewire
hard drives. Get it here:

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Hope this helps,

--seizer

Hello Seizer,

Based on the lawnmower sounds, I will make the following
recommendations:
 - do not turn on that drive again - any further use will make the
problem worse
 - send it to a professional who can evaluate it / recover data
Loud sounds from a disk drive mean that the heads are "crashed" - they
are touching the surface and rubbing the oxide off of the platter. Any
further use would make more of the surface unusable.

If opened up, you would likely see rings where the heads have removed
the surface. I saw this way too often with removable disks 20 years
ago - a drive w/ crashed heads would damage any disk put into it and a
damaged disk would crash the heads on any drive that tried to read it.
I also heard stories about sites that lost the primary disks, several
drives, and the backup disks with people "trying to fix things".

I'd also suggest you close this question so you can't get billed for
an answer.
  --Maniac

seizer-ga,

I agree with Maniac -- that drive is beyond repair except by a
professional.  It would be a different story (possibly) if it were a
different sound.

The Firewire bootup stuff is in the BIOS.

arimathea-ga