recover from logical hdd failure

This afternoon i turned on my pc(nothing was wrong the night before) to come back 20 minutes later and see it still on the vista 'loading' bar. I tried booting in safe mode but it would just stop after getting to a certain .sys file. I tried changing the boot order in the BIOS just incase it was trying to boot from my external HDD(that didn work). Which brings me to logical failure. I was reading on the internet and someone said if its recognized by the bios but you cannot boot its a logical failure.

Now my question is, can i somehow recover data from this drive, or maybe even somehow fix it and still be able to use it and have most of the data?

Thanks,
Reece

Do you have a boot CD to see if it will boot from the optical drive? The sys file it won't load may just be corrupted. But if it boots from CD that at least is one division in the divide and conquer process.

It would be even better if the CD had diagnostics for your drive. See if it's getting a bunch of retries. If the drive tests ok could just be a corrupted driver or boot file.

MilesAhead said:

Do you have a boot CD to see if it will boot from the optical drive? The sys file it won't load may just be corrupted. But if it boots from CD that at least is one division in the divide and conquer process.

It would be even better if the CD had diagnostics for your drive. See if it's getting a bunch of retries. If the drive tests ok could just be a corrupted driver or boot file.

Click to expand...

I have the vista disc, not sure if that's what you mean.

Anything that boots is ok to see if it boots from the optical drive. If it boots ok from that then you should try to find a HD disk diagnostic program. If you have another machine or someone will burn it for you, see if you can get a diagnostic boot CD for you disk drive. Usually the maker of the drive has software downloads on their web site support page.

If it's not a boot CD then if it runs from command line you may be able to run it once you boot the Vista disc to a command prompt.