Hdd smart failure

[b0gy]

I have a hdd witch crashed on me, when i boot the notebook it says smart fialure iminent, and in windows it shows it as offline, when i try to initialize it gives me an error.
Is there any other way theath i can initialize it because i need to recover some data from it.

[zzyz]

First, "initializing" the drive in Windows wouldn't allow you to recover files. By definition, if windows "thinks" the hdd is not initialized, windows is not seeing ANY file structures on the drive (the master boot record, etc) and initalizing it would likely make it less likely to be recoverable.

You need a recovery program that works at the hardware level (i.e., not using Windows systems). The one I would suggest is Spinrite. It works from a bootable diskette or cd. It costs about $90 (not cheap, but what are the lost files worth) and is available at Home of Gibson Research Corporation. Keep in mind, however, depending on what fault is triggering the the SMART alert, files may or may not be recoverable. Spinrite can do amazing things in terms of recovery, so you may still want to give it a try.

Good luck.