Recovering data from hard drive problem

I have an old Pentium notebook. Yesterday, I noticed that there were some problems in one of the directories on the C: partition - there were subdirectories in that directory with ascii characters that weren't there before, and some of the files in that directory were gone. However, everything else was working fine. When I restarted the computer, it wouldn't boot off the hard drive anymore, and when I booted off a floppy, a dir listing showed that there was nothing in the drive. When I tried Scandisk, it said something about how it would have to dump all the data into FILExxxx.CHK files.
Does anyone know if it is possible to recover the directory tree and the files in their original form instead of having to go through all the FILExxxx.CHK files?
Thanks very much
-Sam

1. RE: Recovering data from hard drive problem
lbyard Mar-22-01 01:28 PM
In response to message 0

Sam, First, run a virus scan. Second, there may still be something there. The drive might be configured for EZ or Disk Manager drivers (see http://duxcw.com/faq/hd/hd.htm for more info) to implement Logical Block Addressing (LBA) if the drive is greater than 508 Mbytes. These drivers allow a computer without a BIOS that supports LBA to use large hard disks. I would use a newer version of scandisk. This can be done by making a Win 98 Startup disk on a newer computer (see http://duxcw.com/digest/Fromshop/software/windows/startup/startup.htm) for details). Also, scandisk files include directories. Renaming those files to the original directory names will recreate the directory. Spinrite (http://grc.com/spinrite.htm) can often recover data from hard disk. Then there is the old refrigerator trick mentioned in this forum in a post I made within the last few days and the spin-up fix at http://duxcw.com/digest/Fromshop/harddisk/spinup.htm. If the data is very important and worth noticeable money, there are companies that specialize in recover data I have used Ontrack to recover data from a customer’s disk with success, but it was very expensive. If you do anything besides a recovery tool to write anything to the drive, you may loose the capability to recover the files. Larry