Help - "A disc read error occurred" = Dell no boot

[Lmandrake]

A good friend of mine brought me his Dell Dimension 4600i desktop to see if I could get it running or recover data off of it. I has a single Maxtor 80 Gig IDE HD and reports "A disc read error occurred" as soon as it tries to boot off the HDD. I booted it off a hard drive diagnostic CD and although it passed the short test, the long test produced this code: dca5a979. The software then told me the drive was f-ed and to back up the data on it. A trip to the Seagate(Maxtor) website provided no assistance on what the error meant. Booted the machine with BART PE and it found the drive but could not read anything on it. Then, based on some posts in other forums, installed XP on a spare HDD and booted the system with the sick drive as slave and healthy drive as master. XP sees the drive and the drive management utility sees both the hidden dell partiition on the sick drive as well as the larger portion all to goodies are on. However, XP reports the large partition on the sick drive as unformatted and cannot see anything on it.

I would like to retrieve the data off the sick HDD but really do not know what to try next. The system seems healthy otherwise so I am very confident the hard drive is very sick and that no other issues caused the error message.

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. The owner is a very good friend - he drove many hours to come to my mom's funeral just for my sake.

Thanks

[FlyingPenguin]

I run into this all the time. I've had good success running Spinrite level 2 from a Spinrite boot CD to repair the damaged sectors and then running CHKDSK from a BartPE disc to repair the corrupt file structures.

If the drive is not too far gone you should be able to at least copy the data and maybe even clone the drive.

Spinrite is 90 bucks but they will refund your money if it does work for you.