Expert: Chris Morrison Date: 6/15/2008 Subject: HDD not shut down?
Question Two days ago, I was using my laptop to browse the web, chat, and listen to some music. I was on the browser screen and clicked on the AIM tab in the task bar and waited. And waited. And waited. Tried ctrl + alt + del to no avail several times. Finally, I just shut the thing down manually (holding power switch until it went off). Tried to turn it back on and got to a screen that tells me basically that I have unplugged an external drive (at the time, I had an xD picture card in the card reader as well, but it had not been removed). Tried again, same result. Tried a third time, and pressed F11 to see if it would reboot into recovery mode, which it did. However, not wanting to possibly lose my data (since it restores to factory settings), I exited that and have not been able to get into the recovery part either. I next removed the HDD and put it in another laptop, same result still. Removed the HDD and put it in an external enclosure and its partitions are visible to other computers, but I am unable open them. The main (larger) partition is putting up an error message telling me it has suffered an internal I/O error and the recovery (smaller) partition shows an error message saying that it is corrupted and unrecoverable. So two questions, I guess. Is there a way to stop the drive? And secondly, will a system recovery erase my data?
Oh yes, called HP (HP Pavilion dv6500 series laptop bought new in early December) and they have agreed to restore it to factory specs since it under warranty. They are sending me a program by Roxio (not sure of the name) to perform a back up, but I get the feeling that it won't work if the drive isn't operating correctly.
Answer Well first off a system restore to factory will erase everything, including any partitions you made yourself.
Might be just the partition table is messed up.
Try test disk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
It's free and has the ability to repair partition tables and sometimes the partitions themselves. It can also rescue your data from the drive so you can do a system restore to factory.
The program does not install, it is self contained. If you recover files it will put them in folders in the WIN folder of it's directory. The files will be numbered, not named the original name. But it's free.
Another recovery program is getdataback http://www.runtime.org/
It will preserve the original file name. It is free to check but if you want to actually recover files you have to buy it. It WILL NOT fix the partitions just file recovery.
Both check the disk block by block and work very well. You'll need to have the drive hooked up in the external case as neither will do a boot recovery, only from in windows.
