I have an ancient windows 98-era computer that hasn't been used since around 2005 or so. I went and turned it on since it was still hooked up in the other room and I wanted to back up the data on it. It has xp on it since the old hdd with the 98 install died.
So xp loads up to the desktop just fine, but the computer was running really slow because it's old and had norton and a bunch of other crapware bogging it down.
I leave for about 5 minutes to let it finish booting.
Walk back in, an error box popped up on screen while I was away. I clicked ok, but didn't pay attention to the error. Instant blue screen of death; something about page file in non-paged area if I recall correctly.
The computer automatically reboots.
XP won't boot; disk read error.
I took the hard drive out of that computer and put it in another, more modern one. I tried booting from the hard drive, but got the same disk read error. I then set the hard drive as a secondary drive, and loaded up Windows XP from my primary (working) drive and let it run the default pre-boot disk check.
The drive scan completed overnight and XP booted up, so I don't know if the scan finished correctly or whatever.
When I got into My Computer, it recognizes the drive as being hooked in as a secondary hdd (in other words, an E drive) and a program that I installed on my computer shows that the drive is nearly full, which I'm assuming means that the files are still on it.
When I try to access the drive however, I get a "Disk E:/ is unformatted. Do you want to format?" box.
I clicked no and am currently running Recuva on it to see if I can get the files off it it.
At first, I did a regular scan on it to find files. That completed, and I backed up the small amount that it found to an external hard drive. When I went to inspect them, they all showed up as 0kb files. Obviously, none of them opened.
Then I put Recuva into Deep Scan mode and let it go.
I've been running it for just over 24 hours now. It's currently on phase 1 of 2, found 69197 files (the same amount as it found yesterday before I went to bed), but the progress meter has moved up from 0% to 1%.
The estimated time remaining? 36 DAYS.
The FAQ says that it should take over an hour on a large drive; 36 days is over an hour, but I don't think that's normal just to scan for files, is it? Is something wrong here?
If it helps, it's an 80GB hard drive, and the properties window in My Computer lists it as being RAW format.