Windows XP Clean install cannot find harddrive – help?

September 6, 2009

I installed Fedora, and now wish to uninstall Grub boot loader. The only way I can do that is with a windows XP CD and using the recovery console, I ask my friend and he lent his copy of XP. Once I get to the blue screen where it asks for options, I press recovery console, and then a screen appears stating hard drive cannot be detected… anybody knows how to fix this?

PC hardware:
Compaq Presario Notebook C306US
Operating Systems: Windows XP Media Center and Fedora Core 7
Harddrive: Seagate ST98823AS 80GB 5400RPM 2.5" Sata Laptop Hard Drive

What software program is the good for recovering bad sectors & backing up files of bad hard drive?

September 3, 2009

I am trouble finding a program that can recover bad sectors on my drive, so I can backup my files/data. I have faithfully backup my drives often, but this just suddenly happened without warning . I have a Second Maxtor Hard Drive for backing up data and since there owned by Seagate. I used there diagnostic program to check the drive out which fix’s any errors afterwords. But freeze’s quarter of the way through and can’t get it to finish. I have tried UBootCD and many free programs, but no luck. I have tried to backing up the drive with UBootCD tools, Windows XP Backup program and some others that are free to download. It backup the some the files on the drive that are not bad part of the drive ( bad sectors) , but not all of my files. So need help badly to find a good program can repair the bad sectors and then backup my files/data without losing them. Or finding a program that can backup my files/data even if there is bad sectors. Which I don’t know if you can? Please help me out! I am lost and may lose my DATA.