Louie

Drives are a few inches apart. I will let you know how I get on. Thanks for the help.

Thanks for such an informative response. Much appreciated. I have xp home on both drives. Yes, youre right, windows does try to repair drive but gets stalled due to unreadable sectors and goes no further. Im afraid Ive already used chkdsk. With regard to the live disk, I am not familiar with that at all but will give it a go if you think it will help. So, if that live disk helps me find the data, will it also give me a way to copy it? Trying to copy it by booting up to C drive is proving impossible. Thanks again.

Already tried booting to corrupt drive many times. I get the 'unmountable' error. I know the disk is pretty much dead but Im just trying to save some files. Its not easy as my C drive will just not function well when corrupt D drive is connected.

Thanks for reply. I will try and get back into C drive later and try what you said. I am a little confused though. Before the drive got fried, I could easily swap files back and forth between both drives without changing anything in disk management. Not sure why thats a problem now. I will have a look. Thanks again.

I have a dual boot. Its the D drive that is fried. The C drive works perfect when D drive isnt connected. When I connect D drive back, I can still boot up to C drive but things move at a snails pace if Im lucky. So yeah, I am booting from the working drive and want to copy what I can from the busted D drive. If I try to access the files from 'my computer' the pc usually crashes. But like I said, the thumbnails did pop up during a search. At a loss.

Thanks for advice. I have let my backups slip for a few months. Not backed up photos for 6 months. I will do it a lot more in future! I am still trying to save the photos. Because its a sata drive, I cant slave it to my old pc which is why I was thinking of going the usb link route. I think its the fact that it has an operating system on it that is causing me so much trouble accessing it. The funny thing is, when its connected and I manage to actualy get into my C drive, I once managed to use 'search' and up popped the thumbnails of all the photos. But when I tried to copy them, I got an 'unreadable' error. I know the photos are there, I just need 5mins access to save them. If I reinstalled xp as a repair on top of it, maybe I could get in. I have a feeling that if I could either repair windows or have the pc just treat it as a data drive I may be able to get in. I had a very similiar problem around 8 years ago. I had given up on getting the data back. I cant remember all the details but I think I might have booted up from windows cd, formatted and re-installed windows which allowed me to boot into pc. I then used some recovery program (out of curiousity) and got back a good portion of mp3s and photos. Im clutching at straws here. Will give it some thought. Thanks again

Thanks for reply. Yeah, I thought of using a friends pc but wehn the drive is installed on my pc, my pc slows to a crawl and barely functions. I really dont mind losing the drive, I just want to save some photos of my little boy before trashing it. Thanks again.

Hi All. Hate asking for help so soon after joining but I'm in a real fix. I have a dell dimension dual boot desktop. My little boy pulled the plug out while I was using it yesterday and has fried my D drive. I am not bothered about being able to boot to it, its the lost data that concerns me. When I try to boot to C drive as normal it takes ages and sometimes gets there in the end but it is pretty much unusable. Very slow. I can still see the fried drive in My Computer and can still see some files but cant access or copy them to the working drive. When I try, I get a message saying its corrupt. If I shut down and disconnect the D drive, everything bootts up fine and works perfectly. So, what I really want to know is how can I give myself the best chance of receovering some of the files? Its really just photos. I cant try the corrupt drive in my old pc as it doesnt accept sata drives. I was thinking of purchasing a usb data link cable and trying to access the corrupt drive from my old pc. Any ideas?