I installed SP2 for Windows XP and my drive is no longer accessible

Microsoft do advise that you read their summary prior to installing SP2 but few of us bother - unfortunately. If you end up with an inaccessible drive, it might be worth trying to install the defunct/faulty drive as a secondary drive in another machine (or install in your own as a secondary, and fitting a replacement C drive with basic XP on board) and see if you can access your data (if not the drive) that way. Failing that, if the drive is no longer recognised in BIOS on any machine then it may be trashed totally in which case it would require lab work to recover the data.

There have been problems with an older BIOS on certain motherboards that could wreck an SP2 installation and cause a severe crash. Click here for more information.

Should I open my hard drive?

NO. Please don't do this. Its like taking the back off a watch - it'll never be quite the same again and you could lose your data for all time. The cost of removing data from the platters themselves is no joke when it comes to the costs involved. There is nothing you can repair in there and drives should ONLY opened in a totally dust free environment by a specialist technician. They are totally dust free zones for extremely very good reasons and opening your drive will invite microscopic dust particles that could severely damage the platter surfaces

DO NOT fdisk, reformat, continually restart the machine or allow XP to 'repair' the disk as this may render the data totally unrecoverable. If we get the drive early enough, there is a good chance that we can recover it.

My hard drive is clicking

Clickings sounds are usually caused by the heads being unable to calibrate with the media servo tracks. The drive will continually reset. If it does this, unplug the drive or you'll eventually cause total data loss. In this scenario you'll have no option (if you really want your data back) but to send the drive for clean room or lab work. There are specialist companies who can do this - at a price (anything up to £1000 and beyond). In most other cases however, providing the drive is mechanically sound, even if its not recognisable in Windows, we can extract your data for you - so do call us first!

Hard Drive Problems

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