Corrupt Hard Drive

About a month ago, the hard drive in my wife's desktop pc failed.  I booted up her computer and it took longer than normal for the BIOS to do its thing.  It returned a message saying there is an error with the hard drive and hit F1 to continue.  So, I hit F1.  It should've went to the Windows bootloader but instead told me there is no system disk.  My wife has all of her pictures on this hard disk, so I got a little nervous.  First I made sure there was no USB devices in any slot that the pc might be trying to boot from, and that there was no disc in the DVD drive.  Reboot.  I get the same thing.

I shut the computer down and open it up.  I start investigating and changing jumper settings, switching cables, and moving connections around.  Every time I boot, it's still the same thing.  I started to get a bit worried at this point because my wife has experienced a hard drive failure in the past.  She always means to make backups, but she never gets around to doing it.  The one thing I have going for me at this point is that I can hear and feel the drive spinning up and there is not clicking or any other scary noises.

I am in no way affiliated with any of the software I mention here, but this is what I did next.  I went to my wife's laptop and downloaded the latest Puppy Linux.  Puppy saved me in the past with one of my own hard drives.  Then, since I have no blank CDs, and because I was feeling a bit lazy, I downloaded Unetbootin.  I installed Puppy to USB stick using unetbootin.  So convenient!

Now, back at the desktop, I connected a new (formatted) hard drive and the old drive with all the photos.  I plugged in the USB stick with Puppy on it and turned the computer on.  Of course, I have to set the computer to boot from the USB stick.  I get the same message about the disk error but, this time Puppy runs from the USB stick.  Normally, Puppy boots pretty quickly, but this time I can hear that it is trying to read the failed disk.  It's actually a good sound.  It really was taking a while so I walked away for a few minutes to play with the cats.

Upon my return I see that Puppy has finally booted to its desktop.  I shift my focus to the bottom of the screen where Puppy will show the drives that can be mounted.  There is an SDA, the new drive, an SDB, the USB that Puppy is on, and there is also an SDC.  It read the drive!  But, for how long will the drive be operational?  I start copying files from the old drive to the new one.  It's not fast enough!  I don't want the drive to fail mid process!

Well, I completed the transfer of all my wife's files and photos with no errors.  The drive didn't even seem to have anything wrong with it.  Although, it is a re-certified drive from a company in Singapore I've never heard of.  Anyway, after copying the files I wanted to see if I could try and get the old drive to boot Windows again.  I run "ntfsfix" on the drive and it completes successfully.  This command will set a few things on a corrupted ntfs filesystem that will, hopefully, allow Windows to boot again.  It also forces Windows to run a complete and thorough "chkdsk" scan when it does boot.

I shut down the computer and make the old hard drive the only drive.  Turn the computer on.  I get the same disk error, and the same system error where the Windows bootloader should be.  Well, there are other options for me to explore further, but I think the drive has run its course.  I was able to get the things off of it I needed to, there's no reason to push the drive to absolute failure.  Now to make two or three backups of all of it!