Hi. Thanks for the good read….

Thanks for giving DTI the chance to recover your data!

You actually saved my job and all my personal data. thank you!!!:-)

1.) Logical or soft recovey of data from deletion or soft crash of the hard drive operating system.

2.) External or non-invasive recovery of data from defective electronic external components.

3.) Invasive recovery – internal components of the hard drive have failed. Possible damage to the media (the platters).

4.) Corruption of on disk firmware within the ATA shell (Drive Map).

5.) Combination of all above.

Some laptops are a real pain to replace the hard drive, others it is real easy. Let me know and I will give you an answer.

Now, as for your situation. First, let me say that if you typed in ‘checkdisc’, then nothing happened, or you have a boot disc that has an application on it that I am not aware of. In order to execute ‘chkdsk’, you must type in ‘chkdsk’. In addition, ‘chkdsk’ defaults to ‘READ ONLY’ mode and will not fix anything. You must specifiy the -F parameter as part of your command line, and then, it will delete inodes, adjust the MFT, and basically wreak havoc with your file system. In other words, you either did not use ‘chkdsk’, or you executed it in READ ONLY mode.

As for why the computer works now, and not before. I can only tell you this, from what you have described, ‘checkdisc’, or ‘chkdsk’, or ‘whatever-disc’ did not ‘fix’ your wifes PC. I believe, you have bad sectors on the drive. They can fade in and out. In other words, sometimes they will read, sometimes they won’t. Its just a matter of time before you lose more data.
Once again, I caution everyone, DO NOT RUN CHKDSK, if you value your data.

I took my wife’s 4yr old P4, 2.4GHhz laptop with its dreaded blue screen along to the local one man computer store along with my boot disk. After managing to get my boot disk to start up he chose ‘Full install’ instead of ‘Repair’. I was annoyed and asked if he could stop and do a ‘repair boot’ instead, as I needed to rescue a lot of data?
The guy said “No, it wont repair, it needs a new hard drive. That’s arround eighty five dollars plus parts, and you’ll lose everything.”
When I declined he offered me $250-00 cash for my laptop.
Next I took it to a bigger fancier store, they wanted $25 for a ‘Diagnostic check’ and they would ring that evening. They didn’t ring so I rang them, they said “Try tomorrow”. Next day I rang and was told, “Needs a new hard drive $125-00 plus $130-00 labour, plus minimum $230-00 to rescue your data files.”
I declined and said “I cant afford that, and I’ll pick it up right away.”
When I arrived they had lost my ‘Boot disk and when I asked to speak to the guy who had checked it, I was told “He’s off today, come back tomorrow.” I returned the next day and ***I was in luck – they had found my ‘Boot disk’ after all. So in spite of making three 1 hour round trips, I walked out pleased!!!
I took it home and fooled around with the boot up until I got into ‘DOS’. Lo and behold a list of commands is available these days. So I typed in the checkdisc command and the machine whirred away until displaying the test results which seemed OK to me. I then tried starting Windows XP and was successful.
So I bought some blank Cd’s and was able to save all my wife’s precious pictures and data on two Cd’s. OK so it’s my wife’s m/c and I have told her to back up, I know I should have done it.
Epilogue:- Windows now continues to behave OK after a week or two, fingers crossed.
Should I sell it to the first shop for $250-00, and buy a new one?

Can it actually damage my hard drive?