Hi everyone,

I've successfully recovered data off of dead disks by replacing the controller board from another disk. My GF lost a disk with some not yet backed up stuff on it. I tried the controller board replacement but the drive exhibits the same symptoms, which are:

Disk is recognized by the BIOS

Windows XP runs chkdisk at boot, which eventually finishes with errors. Chkdisk recognizes the drive as NTFS and has the correct disk label. There are read errors 34% of the way into the file check (step 1).

After boot, the drive is recognized by the system, but as unformatted. Disk Management shows it as "healty" but with no filesystem. Any attempt to access the drive gives the "Would you like to format" dialog box.

Obviously, this disk is *somewhat* readable. What would a professional data restorer do at this point? I'm trying to bring it up in Knoppix and see if I can get some files off that way. What other software or procedures do these guys use after a controller board swap doesn't fix the problem? Anyone know?

Best,

Jim