<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en"> <html> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> Hi Brian, There is at least 1 company out there whose business is recovering data from damaged disk drives. You could do a search and find one if the data is worth that to you. I have no idea what this would cost. Another possibility is a program called Spinrite. I cannot find my manual so I can't tell you the manufacturer but this program does marvelous things with bad disk drives. You would have to have it on a bootable 3 1/2 disk and run it from there and it thoroughly tests every sector on your disk, recovering all the information it can rewriting even the sector ID parts giving you a fresh recording of the whole disk. You can expect this program to run many hours on a good disk and more when it finds errors but this program would be your best bet to put your drive in a condition to retrieve you data. Norm Barrett Memphis chapter PTG Brian Trout wrote: <blockquote TYPE=CITE><style></style> Hi list, Any of you computer types out there care to offer an opinion? I'm typing this on a new laptop computer.  I love it.  It's 3 times the computer my old one (only 1 1/2 years old) is/was. I'd really like to retrieve some of the old information from my old computer, but I'm not sure I can.  Basically, it has begun hard drive failure, and most of the information that I would like to access is there on the hard drive.  It will boot up, but it will not run Windows, even in the 'safe' mode.  I've tried running the Scandisk program that was onboard, but it keeps finding errors it can't fix.  When it gets to the disk scan, it keeps finding sections of the hard drive that are "about to fail" and moves the info to another part of the disk.  And talk about slow... the Scandisk program files tell me that it 'should' take about 10 minutes for a disk scan... it took 4 hours to go through 10% and then quit because it couldn't handle the job. Anybody have any suggestions?  Do you think a program like Norton utilities or another similar program would be able to help me?  or is it too late? I've been a bad boy for not backing up my work earlier.  I'm thinking of replacing the hard drive on the old computer, and perhaps looking into a zip drive for a little more secure backup.  I'm also in the market for a program like Norton utilities, or a similar product.  But I sure would like to have some of that old info... The upside is, now I have a portable computer and can play with the Tunelab program I downloaded!! Anyway, if you have an idea, thought, suggestion, or note of sympathy, I'm receiving them all with open ears.  :-) Thanks, Brian TroutQuarryville, PA<a href="mailto:btrout@desupernet.net">btrout@desupernet.net</a> </blockquote> </body> </html>