Hard Disk Recovery in windows.. Help Needed

I been having trouble with a friends machine. The system was booting and rebooting. I tried running windows setup to repair XP but that didnt work. So my last attempt was to take his hard disk home with me and backup his files so we could do a fresh install.

My first attempt i had his hard drive accessible on my machine but i had to reboot. When i rebooted windows didn’t recognise the partition on the hard drive. I cannot access it and windows is asking to format it.

Partition magic is showing it as a RAW partition i cant seem to set up a file system on the hard drive. Can any one help i need to access this drive to get of his files which are very important for his buisness. I dont know much about data recovery so any help will be good

It sounds like your friend's hard drive is borked.
I suggest you download Ultimate Boot CD ver. 4.1.1 & burn the .iso file to CD.
Leave your friends HDD connected to your comp, & run the appropriate diagnostic tool for a full check of his HDD.
If the HDD checks out OK, you can use the UBCD to check other comonents of your friend's machine: CPU, Memory, etc.
-Dave

Depending on the file system of the drive, use either NTFS or FAT Data Recovery Software . Even I had to recover some important files which I had lost due to partition table corruption. The data was not accessible. With the help of the software I was able to scan for lost partitions and further recovered the lost data.

All the best!

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It sounds like the drive is dead or dieing. If I were you I would skip running any diagnostics on the drive. If there is something physically wrong with the drive such as dust getting in it, every time the head passes over the disk even to just read you are risking damaging more data. Also, you already know the drive is screwed, so diagnosing the reason doesn't help that much. I would go strait to recovery -- search around on the internet or use a program someone suggested here to try to read the data off the drive.

Attempting to write to the drive is definitely a no-no at this point, but even trying to read from the drive (depending on what is wrong with it) risks further data loss. You mentioned he has data for his buisness on the drive. Depending on how critical the data is (what would be the $ cost to him if the data were lost forever), I would consider even skipping the self recovery step and seeking professional help. There are a number of companies you can find by just doing a google search that do professional data recovery. How it works is you send them the drive and it will cost around $100 for them to diagnose the problem and give you a quote of what it will cost to recover the data. The recovery part can be anywhere from $100 to $2000 depending on how badly damaged the drive is. In your case it would be the lower end since the drive didn't go through a house fire and then get smashed with a sledge hammer. And of course if the data is only semi critical you could try self recovery and then seek professional help if it doesn't work out.