Acer Extensa 5610 Sata Hard drive - XP corrupt! HELP!

[mb2k01]

It's not very often I post things where I am completely and utterly stuck... so I'm hoping someone takes pitty on me and saves my sanity...

 

I have an Acer Extensa 5610 laptop (which sods law, belongs to a Headteacher!).

It arrived to be with XP installed and stuck in a blue screen circle of death (turns on, asks whether you want to start Windows XP normally or via safe mode, last known good etc etc). Goes to XP splash screen, gives you a quick flash of a blue screen and restarts.

 

Now the problem. The Head wants his data taken off it and as it's a standalone laptop doesn't have a backup! Not a problem you'd think... wrong!

 

Attempt 1 - Copy the data to my desktop machine

- The Extensa HDD is SATA, so plugged it directly in to my desktop and found two drive letters appeared. Drive G was a 50GB FAT32 partition with one folder + temp file. Drive H was a RAW volume with no properties, no files, crashing if trying to do too much.

Result - Can't copy (or see) Windows Directory or My Docs etc!

 

Attempt 2 - Re-install Windows over the top (hoping it would stick the old docs in a windows.old folder!)

- Get as far as pressing enter to install Windows and it says can't find the Hard Drive. Assume this is a SATA driver issue.

 

Attempt 3 - Re-isntall Windows + use "F6 floppy" tool with SATA drivers

Same result as attempt two!

 

I've actually done nothing else today! I've sat in an office at well over 30 degrees, air con not installed until next week(!) and aren't any further forward to having it fixed than I was at 8.40 this morning!!

 

Anyone have any ideas (apart from the obvioius throw against a wall / give up!)

I don't care what happens to the laptop - I'll buy him a new one out of my budget quite hapily, but he'll still want his data!

 

Cheers

 

PS - Out of warranty, Acer support less than helpful - told me to make a slipstream CD which I actually ended up doing and that didn't work either!

[kmount]

Forget the laptop in my view, hard disk into your machine and try PhotoRec to see if it can find anything.

[FN-GM]

Had the same thing with the same laptop.

 

Go in the bios and check the SATA settings. I think you need to turn SATA into legacy mode.

[kmount]

I doubt it's anything to do with the laptop if the disk causes the PC to freeze when accessed.

 

Using something like Photorec is your best option short of paying a professional company to take a look.

[mb2k01]

@FN-GM - The BIOS is the most cut down version of BIOS you'd ever be likely to see!

I went in hoping to at least see SATA mentioned somewhere in there, or IDE emulation - anything lol. Not a sausage! The closest you can get to SATA configuration is changing the boot order (lol that sounds stupid but I mean it litterally!)

 

@kmount - Thanks for that. I'll check the software out.

At this point I have to agree - certainly not wasting more time on a repair tomorrow. Efforts will be concentrated in data retrieval and this can be the last Acer notebook I touch for a while!