[slodave]

Tip of the night for dealing with problem hard drives:
(besides having a good backup)

1) If the drive/data is accessible, but you have BSODs, errors, slow. Ghost the drive. It's a good way of preserving the file system and data. If the drive turns out to be bad, you can ghost the image back to a new drive and save yourself a lot of time from having to reinstall everything. If you can't access the drive/data proceed directly to step 2.

2) Before messing with the drive... Run a diagnostics test on it. You will save yourself a lot of time. One of the utilities I use shoes the error disposition code but also uses green and red backgrounds to make it really simple to see the condition of the drive. I rarely bother with the codes, as they are really only used if you RMA the drive. If green, you know the drive is 99% good and it's a data/MBR/partition problem.

3) From the read out of step 2, proceed in the best way to fix the drive or restore the data to a new one.

Okay. I've had a really long and stressful week dealing with a major upgrade of a proprietary software package that runs a clients entire facility. I am done being the IT guy for the night. Time to lose my mind to mind numbing reality shows or a movie.