Hey, I'm hoping somebody here will be able to give me some guidance as I'm running out of ideas...

Background:
Partners computer decided randomly one morning that her system HDD doesn't work anymore. I tried all sorts of bios settings, cable and jumper combinations but the bottom line is that her computer would not recognize the drive even existed, not even at bootup let alone in windows after reinstalling windows onto her backup drive. I placed the damaged drive into my computer and not only did it not show up anywhere but it stopped my backup hdd from displaying in windows (told me it had to be formatted).

I've determined that the only way I can get anything out of the hdd is to place it on an IDE channel all by itself. Luckily my primary hdd is a SATA drive so all I had to do was unplug my backup drive and we were in business, sort of...

So windows now recognize the new piece of hardware and installs drivers for it. The problem now is that the Disk Management utility shows the physical drive (80g WD drive with 2 partitions) as only 7.5g in size. I assume that this space is what was left over from the 2 partitions. I also noted that my computer is VERY slow to boot past the windows loading screen when the damaged drive is attached.

Recover My Files Results:
Not good so far I'm afraid. I download the latest version and have tried to run fast and complete format recovers on the 7.5g physical drives to no avail. The search starts and it all seems OK but it runs incredibly slowly. I left it running overnight and almost 9hours later the search box read something like, "searching drive 0-80 of 16540064". Yes, that says 80 of 16 million. Now after 9 hours my very poor math skills tell me that I would have to wait somewhere around 100 years for that search to finish

Oh and my computer that I'm trying to repair the drive on is WinXP Pro x64 edition. I don't know if this makes any difference but the stupid OS stuffs up so many programs that I never can be sure

So what now? Is there any hope left?

I don't know if they've been fixed yet, but a while back WinXP64 had driver issues because no one had written new drivers for it. This could lead to some devices not working at all or working slower than normal. This could be a problem.

Beyond that, it sounds like the HD itself is physically damaged, either mechanically or electronically. It appears that it doesn't want to work anymore. If you really have to get the data off it, then you might want to talk to a data recovery company. They may also have a few hints you can try before you take it in.

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It sounds like your drive has some serious errors and unfortunately I don’t think a data recovery software solution will be up to the task in your case. You will have to look for a physical data recovery solution. Look for a reliable data recovery company. We have 1000 PCs in our office and we often hire services of Salvage Data Recovery Lab of Stamford. I don’t have their address readily available. I will have to ask our IT Manager. You may search in internet by the name to get further detail from their site. Let me know if you have problem.