Dell Inspiron 1100 harddrive failure

[LeftyAce]

Hi all,

A friend of mine has a 4 year old inspiron laptop with a 60GB Fujitsu harddrive. The drive appears to have a corrupted sector that is preventing windows from booting. The drive fails the fujitsu diagnostic test with the error code "A101T1."

I booted knoppix on the laptop, and it can see two partitions on the harddrive, and can read the dell recovery partition just fine. Attempting to mount the C partition yields an error that the filesystem is corrupt. Running chkdsk /f from the windows install cd gets about 25% and then fails with "non fixable errors."

I believe data is salvageable, based on the fact that I can mount 1 partition on the drive, but I can't figure out how to run this data recovery software without a working windows environment: http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/

If I'm not mistaken, the harddrive has some special connector, so I can't plug it into a desktop, and my IDE to USB adapter doesn't fit it either.


Sorry for the huge post, but my question is, are there bootable data recovery CDs? Or is there a way to connect a Dell laptop harddrive to another computer? Thanks in advance!

[EzyStvy]

Newegg has adaptors for about six dollars that would allow you to slave the drive to a desktop pc.

[Panama Red]

Get one of these adapters and you can access 2.5, 3.5 pata and 3.5 sata hdd's via usb 2.0.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cpc=SCH

Or, if you just want to access notebook hdd's via ide, get this adapter. You'll need to supply a separate ide cable for this one.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-108&cpc=SCH

[LeftyAce]

Well I had the ability to borrow a USB cable all along, but I didn't realize that the weird connector on the harddrive was just an adapter. Pop it off, and you've got a standard mini-ide connection

Unfortunately it seems the disk is truly dead; scanning for files gets stuck at .07%....

Thanks to both of you for the input. Looks like it's time for a new drive.