Hoping to Recover Data On a Bad Hard Drive
tl;dr Bad hard drive, missing hal.dll, no Windows XP disk, hoping to live boot with knoppix but it's not working.
A year and a half ago, my old PC (brand new in 2003/4) was hit with a power surge that fried the power supply and apparently corrupted the the hard drive. I only recently decided to see if I could get it working and recover some data on it.
I replaced the power supply and got it up and running, but when it boots up, It throws a message stating hal.dll is missing. I no longer have the Windows XP disk or a repair disk. My fault for going full Apple. I tried my hand at booting live from a CD with the current Knoppix version, however the system can't find a boot version on the CD or the drive. I changed BIOS settings to boot from CD first just in case that might have been an issue.
How far gone is the hard drive? Any chance of getting this working without spending $500 with data recovery specialists?
Posted Oct 25, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC
The best way to recover the data is to plug the hard drive into another computer as a slave drive, thus taking the onus of operating system away from the corrupted hard drive. Often there are no other problems with the disk and most information can be recovered intact. You may need to run a Check Disk first (chkdsk.exe) so that the OS can mark bad (corrupted) sectors and therefore avoid them when attempting to read the disk.
If you could obtain access to a second computer you can attempt this method of data recovery.
From the post I gather that you bought an Apple computer after your PC died, is it a laptop, or a desktop, does it have an IDE cable that you could plug your corrupted drive into? Will Apple computers read the NTFS file system, or is there an Apple program that will? If so, you may not have to go any further.
You could also obtain a NAS enclosure (Network Accessible Storage) and put the drive in that, then plug it into the Ethernet port of your Apple and access it that way, thus allowing you access to your data.
Ad for the Knoppix CD, I've had similar issues that were fixed by re-burning the CD, and making sure to set the burning program up so that it is burning a bootable CD. Some programs have a checkbox or setting that will allow you to burn a system disc(again I'm not so sure about Apple burning, could be the 'system' disk files are not PC compatible thus the error message on boot).
If all else fails, send it to me, I can get attempt these methods and recover your data (or what's recoverable anyway).
I just bought an IDE to USB adapter online. I'll give this a shot. Thanks for your help.
yeah that's the other option I didn't mention. Hope it works for you!
Just an update on my file recovery issue. The IDE/USB cable (came with a power adapter) arrived in the mail today for $12 shipping included. I hooked it up and let it work its magic. It seems OSX has no problems reading NTFS, so I was able to recover everything I needed and then sum. I'll donate the old PC to Goodwill Computer Works this weekend. Thanks for the advice.
Glad you got what you needed, and thanks for the update!
Hi-jacking a bit. I find it easier to just drop an Ubuntu CD in and run that straight off the disk (don't install the OS on your HD). If there's readable data on the drive, you should be able to see it; then, you can copy it off with a thumb drive or external HD.