Does the hard disk still spin up (when you turn your computer on, do you hear the sound of it spinning up)? Or does it just sit there and do nothing (bad) or go >click-click< (worse)?

Assuming it spins up, is it making unusual noises, like a loud whine (generally signs that the drive is dying)?

Can you boot into Windows from the disk? If you can, your best solution is to attempt to copy all the files to another disk or to CD/DVDs. If you can't boot to Windows, then what you do next depends on your version of Windows and the filesystem used on the disk. If it's FAT or FAT32, then you could use Knoppix or similar to copy what you can from it. If it's NTFS (which is likely if you're using Windows NT/2000/XP/2003), then Knoppix probably won't help (as it needs the NTFS drivers from your Windows install to read NTFS). But what you can do is install a fresh copy of Windows onto another partition or another disk if possible, and copy the files that way.

Also, if you have any disk imaging software (DriveImage, Acronis, Ghost), then try to make an image of the disk. If you can successfully image it, then after doing that unplug the disk and try to recover the files from the image using the tools that came with the software. Of course, this isn't much use if you only have one hard disk.


(Link: in WinNT/2k/XP you use chkdsk /F at a command prompt instead of scandisk. If you want to check a system disk or a disk with the pagefile on it, it'll give you the option to perform the check at the next boot instead. NTFS I think handles bad sectors in the background, unlike FAT where you have to do a surface scan to mark sectors as bad. With recent disks (anything over a few gig is recent enough), the disk itself remaps bad sectors internally. If you see bad sectors in Windows, it generally means your disk is dying.)


(I recently had a disk failure - the disk itself still spun up, but was throwing read and write errors all over the place. And it was formatted with NTFS, which meant Knoppix was no use (as it was the system disk, and Knoppix couldn't find the drivers on it to be able to write to NTFS). Ended up doing a fresh install of Win2k on another disk, and doing a brute-force xcopy of the entire tree (some 20 gig or so) from the bad disk to the other. The disk in question was making a very loud whine, which is Not Good and can mean that the platters are wobbling. Apart from that it seemed fine, but literally fell apart overnight (was working fine, went home from the weekend, came back and powered up computer, about an hour later it was throwing errors everywhere). DriveImage fell apart with read errors when trying to image it as well)