MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

Bloody HDD has gone tits up on my home desktop PC. I was doing some rewiring in my sons bedroom yesterday and I shouted to my wife to turn off the PC then I isolated the mains. Unfortunately I think I killed the power defore it had completely shut down now I'm in the XP boot then restart before login loop and it wont boot into safe mode.

I've tried booting from the XP CD and repairing but I dont get the option to repair only to format and reinstall XP. I can get to the recovery console but I havent tried anything within the recovery console yet.

I've also tried booting from UBCD4Win but it cant see the HDD. Some of the applications within UBCD4Win can see the drive and report back its size but so far none of them can read any data from it.

Most of my photos etc. are on an external drive but I think some from our recent trips are still on the main HDD (DOH!).

I'm no HDD guru so I'm not sure what causes the above problem and most of what I've read online just points to running chkdsk to try and fix it which I will try later.

Any other suggestions would be welcome such as freeware recovery utilities to try and get some of the data off the drive before I give up and format it if all is lost.

I'm assuming as windows starts to boot and I can at least see there is a drive connected and what its size is that there is some hope of recovering data from the drive... I might be wrong though.:-(

There is no sin except stupidity.