Earn 300 Geek Credits by leaving the comment that is used and works to help a Geek recover some data off a bad hard drive situation!
A little over a week or so ago my wife told me about a SMART error message that popped up on her desktop. She’s running Windows XP Professional on a Dell Dimension 8400 with Intel’s RAID controller running two SATA drives using RAID-1. No problem, I thought…
Before being able to fix the problem with a new hard drive, she had a blue screen then while trying to reboot a message stating that “hal.sys” could not be found. Going into Recovery and trying to pull up a directory we get “Directory could not be enumerated.” At this point, I’m starting to sweat a little…
So, considering the drive is part of an array, I can’t simply place in a USB enclosure or another machine to try to recover the data… it has to be hooked to the RAID controller.
I’ve also tried using Knoppix to access the partitions, but with limited luck. I’ve still got the broken hard drive (been on vacation for a week so I haven’t replaced yet) and am currently freezing it with hopes of being able to bring the partition up through Knoppix to transfer the data to a USB drive.
By the way, you lose 50 Geek Credits if you admonish me about not keeping backups! I do have backups but would miss a couple sets of digital photos that I really do not want to lose as well as some settings that I do not backup.