Transferring Files Between OSs from Failing Drives
Ok, so my PC is a big piece of crap - it will just turn off randomly, making it impossible to get anything done. Which is why I bought a Mac. My issue now is that I have about 50 gigs of music on a 320gb hard drive in an external enclosure that’s plugged into my PC. I tried plugging it into my Mac to get the music off, but no luck, it just sees a big blank hard drive. I’m trying to get my PC to work long enough for me to copy music to my iPod and then copy it onto my Mac with Senuti, but that has also been proven impossible. Is there any way to get my Mac to read my Windows-formatted hard drive so that I can get my music off?
Yuck, not a fun problem!
If you can get access to another PC and another external drive, you can plug both of them in and copy everything over to the good drive. It’s best if the PC you’re working with is Premium whatever so that it has administrative control.
Very important: with a failing hard drive, you don’t want to work on it over and over trying things that aren’t working. You need to get through the process as quickly as possible.
That said, there are a couple things you can do to try and prolong the life of the failing drive while you work out the solution. One is don’t use it at all - give it some time. The other is to stick it in the freezer for 24 hours or longer.
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Sometimes NTFS hard drives just don’t like to show up right on macs or even pc’s for that matter.there is some free software that allows you to extract data like MHDD has the ability to extract files(on a PC only haven’t tested Intel macs).
Now since it seems as if it is just having sector problems there is a program called NTFS explorer (http://www.runtime.org/diskexpl.htm) what allows you to bypass the bad sectors since its a bootable CD
Also since it probably is NTFS since it was running windows then a Linux live CD some times will allow you to transfer data from the drive because it does not allow you to write to the drive what can also save the drive.
http://myharddrivedied.com/ is a good site to go to if there are any files on there that you cant live with out but it is not cheep.
the last resort if you want to get the data really bad and not enough to pay money. if it is making the dreaded Click of Death the freezer method by putting the drive in a ziplock bad and putting it in the freezer for about 15 minutes can allow you the amount of time needed to save the files since it contracts the metal on the drive allowing it to be accessed till it warms up but this is only a last resort because it can cause condensation to form on the drive and fry it all together.
another option is to get a copy of spinrite. it may be able to fix the drive. the software is like a miracle pill for most people! chances are you’ll be able to recover most if not ALL of your data and get it saved off to another drive.
you just pop the cd into your drive and boot it up. if you have a tower machine it would be better to plug it directly into the motherboard, but spinrite will still work on external drives, just not as effectively.
check it out at: http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
-d
You said that the pc shuts off randomly, which could be many anything, but the easiest to test is overheating. Open up the case and position a fan to blow on the internals and fire it up. Also make sure that none of the fans have come loose, or are blocked. This may buy you enough time to do what you need… if it’s an overheating issue. If not, you at least get to poke around in the case.