Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

viperdk · Joined: 03 Jun 2009 Posts: 1

This is in relation to a Western Digital 200GB SATA hard drive (Model: WD2000JD) in a 3 year old Sony Viao. In a nutshell, here is the issue/story:

1. When the computer powered on, it would give a "Third Master Hard Disk Error- SMART Status BAD, Backup and Replace" at system boot. When pressing F2 to continue, it would then say it's missing a key windows file (/system 32) and could not load XP.

2. I assumed it was a bad boot sector, and ran "FIXBOOT C:" from the repair/recovery tool of a Windows XP disk. This converted my file system from NTFS to FAT. The whole process took about 5 seconds (so no format occurred).

3. Upon initial re-boot, I now got a "Missing NTLDR" error and NONE of the files that were on the drive prior were readable. However, the drive could still be accessed as C through Windows Pre-Install disks and a Windows XP install disc. It just was a different smaller file system partition with a few new folders.

4. I tried connecting the drive in a different computer using Vista, and while the "Device Manager" would recognize the drive, "My Computer" and "Disk Management" did not. An icon did pop up in the Notification bar (by the clock) that claimed to see a drive with errors. When I clicked on that, it brought up a box that showed me the 2 hard drives I had connected as "Non RAID," one of which was bad. This was indicated by a yellow mark by it due to a "SMART error." There was a "Fix SMART error" option which I clicked. The yellow error icon went away after 2 seconds but "My Computer" and "Disk Management" still wouldn't identify the drive. If I disconnect the drive and re-connect it, the yellow error returns.

5. When placing the drive back into it's home computer, now I didn't even get the NTDLR error. I still get an error at power on, but that too changed to no longer referencing the SMART error- just simply announces the "Third Master Hard Disk Error." The BIOS still identifies the drive and assigns it a boot priority, but the computer will not recognize it as a bootable drive at startup- I just get a "No Bootable Device" error. Also no Windows Pre-Install disks nor the Windows XP install disc now identify it in any way shape or form. I tried running FDISK just to try and view any active partitions (without making any partition changes), and all I get is an "Unable to access drive 1" flashing error message.

I have tried a couple trial versions of recovery software without any result in both the bootable disc (on the Viao) and windows program(on the Vista PC) form. They won't recognize the drive either. But since the BIOS still does and nothing I ever did took longer than a few seconds I'm fairly sure nothing was ever formatted and the data is still on there. The boot sector is just all screwy. I'm not looking to salvage the drive, just the data on it and I don't want to have to pay $1,000 to bring it to a data recovery firm. ANY help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.