I don’t see many mdt (magnetic data technologies) hard drives, but with the few that I do see, its usually to recover data.

This particular one gave some very obvious signs: when the PC started, the bios POST warned dire consequences due to the SMART monitoring of the hard drive.

Continuing from that lead to windows XP taking a very long time to start. In fact, after 5 minutes, it still hadn’t started, so I decided to pull the plug and take the PC back to the office.

I sometimes dread doing data recovery, as it can sometimes mean complete data loss. And I have yet to find a customer that is prepared to pay $600 – $3000 to recover their digital photos (or even their accounting files!).

I was hoping this wouldn’t be a battle lasting many hours, while shuttling between the PC and the freezer.

Anyway, it all looked promising. I could easily read a few random files when I connected the drive to the office pc.

I decided to try a clone onto a 40GB hard drive… and the cloning process worked perfectly.

After that, I spent some time updating the XP (SP2, autopatcher, ms updates, antivir, defender, winpatrol, spyware blaster, defrag), then the PC was ready to go back to its owner