Let me explain. I am not trying to do anything illegal…really. The hd on my HP Pavillion laptop crashed. It was running Vista Home Premium which came with preinstalled. I have no recovery disk. Yes there is a recovery partition on the drive but nothing in it. I own a valid Vista key but cannot find anyone with an actual install disk. So….I fell back on the only thing I had….an old version of XP Pro from a previous employer. The key was valid then, not anymore. As such, windows will not allow me to update to Service Pack 2, which is keeping my laptop from doing many of the functions it is capable of! Suggestions?

So a few days ago, my Acer Laptop crashed and was giving me a message saying "Media test failure, check cable" and would not load Windows (XP) at all. I tried to reformat the HD…same problem occured. So I had an old HD from another laptop that I tried out to see if the HD was bad. I was able to load, but a day or so later it blue screened saying something about "win32k" (the blue screen rebooted too quickly for me to get the rest). So, assuming my problem with a HD prob, I went out and got a completely brand new HD and attempted to reimage using my recovery disk. When loading windows an error appeared saying something about a IE file being "corrupt and unreadable" and to "run disk check utility." I did and it "truncated" several files, but everything was running fine. I loaded everything again and within a few minutes of installing service pack 3, i got another blue screen. disk check found two "invalid" files. Can someone help please?! I’m desperate! Thanks!

Hits on the internet are telling me I can recover my documents before they are overwritten by new files. But how come others say that a reformatted hard disk still has chance to be completely recovered of its old files? It sounds like there is a greater possibility to recover files from reformatted hard disk than files accidentally erased but still existing somewhere in my HD. Please explain and clarify to me everything bout this matter and suggest what would I do coz I accidentally deleted my documents and I’ve been crying for two hours now. thnx

Im having problems with my current HD that my current version on XP Home is installed on.
I have a new HD in a box.
I went to Compaq site and saw they offered a recovery disc for my coputer XP service pack 2 for .
My main thing I was going to do is basically burn my important files on a disc, and then trash the old troublesome Hard Drive and get the recovery CD and Recover my system to the new Hard Drive.
Will that work?
Better yet, does everyone understand what Im trying to do?
I may have a worm or something, dont know why the hard drive is acting up, but I dont want to connect the new hard drive up when the old one is in there at the same time.

A few years ago my maxtor daimond plus 9 250gb hard drive was left inside my computer running and this girl i know was using it while i was
away. She said there was some smoke coming from it and then the
computer just shut off.

I was mad, I took out the hard drive and seems on the board a part
was burnt. After that I could not use it at all and nothing will detect
the hard drive.

Besides going through a hard drive recovery service that can get
the data, what else could i do?

I have almost a same model hard drive. The maxtor diamond plus 10 250gb hd. I was wondering if theres any way to switch whatever I
need like the disk inside in order to try to recover the data.
Would I be able to? And how would I there are weird screws on
all the hard drives I wouldnt know what tool to use.

But is it possible using this method?

Getting " Primary Master hard Disk S.M.A.R.T Status Bad" when trying to Boot and it wont go past this screen, this is my in laws PC and they have had virus problems etc in the past. I think it needs a new HD but wanted to try a system recovery first. Anyone know any good sites where i can burn the System Recovery Disks?

I need a Data Recovery program that is free that i can burn an ISO image and boot from the CD drive to detect a problem with my HD. My computer wont boot with the HD connected.
Thanks!!

My Macbook laptop just recently starting having problems and is no longer recognizing the hard drive for whatever reason. Apple can fix it for me by putting in a new HD but I would very much like to save the files that I know are still stored on the old HD. Does anyone have any recommendations on a good mail away or local (to Northen Virginia) data recovery service? How much is this probably going to cost me?