Hardware Physically Damaged HDD ....

[Felipe_9595]

Well,i had a really shitty incident the last week. My HDD has 120 GB and it has 3 partitions, The C: one (50GB), where i have installed Windows XP, The D: one (67GB) where i store the random crap and backups and a E: partition of 3 GB where i have Linux. Last week i was playing LoL, and in the middle of the match my HDD began to do a clicking noise (2 clicks each 4 seconds) and the game closed. Upon restart, Grub loader loaded fine and showed me the Windows and Linux installations. When i booted windows, the loading screen would come up, but in the middle of it the clicking noise would return and a BSoD would force a restart.So, is pretty obvious that the drive is damaged. The weird part is, that if i try to boot Linux, it loads fine, it even works correctly, and if from Linux, i try to access the D: partition, it loads too. If i try to enter C: the drive starts clicking and Linux never finish loading it. And if i load Gparted the clicking comes back too and it never finish listing the partitions.

So, pretty much i can save everything from D: , but there is any posibility to recover something off the C: partition?

 

[Originality]

If the header can no longer read the physical sectors that contains C, then it's lost for good. Barring expensive data recovery services.

 

[Felipe_9595]

If the header can no longer read the physical sectors that contains C, then it's lost for good. Barring expensive data recovery services.

Damn, thank you nyway.

Since the thing is pretty much fried but i can still "use" the D:/ and E:/ partition, would be wise to try to format and install an OS there? iIts not like it cant get worse lol

 

[FAST6191]

Was that an intentional double negative?

Anyway once a hard drive going down the tubes it is best to consider it dead and save what you can from it- by all means continue to use it for scratch space if you do not mind a potential bit of corruption at some point but I would not trust it to hold files and certainly not run an OS I expect a measure of reliability from.

I am also inclined to say c:\ is gone but it would not hurt to wave http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download over it (linux versions are readily available) as it can still sometimes get in there where the other tools fail.