Broken hard drive

[soLitary]

I had a hard drive that held 320 Gbytes and still have it somewhere. It recently had a virus and something occured with windows xp. Is there some way I can get this problem fixed so I can get some more game son my computer?

Demonik

 

[torzak]

You could try to re format the hard drive if you are willing to lose the files on the hard drive.

 

[soLitary]

I would be but, how would I do that not the smartest about computers.

 

[torzak]

Im not exactly sure with XP but with Vista you can right click on the hard drive in My Computer and click format.

 

[soLitary]

Thing is I cant even go to a start menu or nothing from what I recall. Cant i just take it somewhere?

 

[torzak]

You can take it to somewhere like BestBuy and they can format it for you. Also if you have the OS disc you can use it to format the hard drive. Just put in the disc Choose Boot from disc in the BIOS and it should start the installation, it should ask you what hard drive you want to install on, click the hard drive that is messed up and then click format. This is how i did it on vista it should be pretty similar on XP. If that doesnt work you can google how to format hard drive on XP.

 

[soLitary]

Thanks for the help gonna check best buy sometime soon.

 

[gothroach]

If you do format it to use again, remember to do a full low-level format. If you do a quick format, all the data that was on the hard drive is still there, and can still cause problems.

 

[Prisoner416]

Use Recuva on it first to see if there's any files you can save.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

If you're willing to pay, I use http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm to recover data. It has yet to fail me.

 

[gothroach]

Use Recuva on it first to see if there's any files you can save.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

If you're willing to pay, I use http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm to recover data. It has yet to fail me.

I've had excellent success with Zero Assumption Recovery, but it is another paid one (it can only recover 1 folder at a time in free mode). I'll check those other ones out - I do a lot of data recovery and such for clients, always on the lookout for better tools .