I haven't been in my laptop BIOS for a long long time (at least a year), and even then I leave HDD detection to automatic, rather than manually setting them.

I canceled the GetDataBack scan to try file scavenger. I do not have 16,000 files that are under 1 MB on that drive, and everything higher only adds up to 12 GB. I have yet to try to actually recover anything yet.

I'll try running GetDataBack again and skip the sectors that were giving me problems. =/

if anyone is curious on how I am doing, I am VERY SLOWLY recovering the data on my hard drive.

I am using GetDataBack for NTFS, and using Noel Danjou's Media Checker as well as Nero burning DVD images to help confirm data integrity. It is a very slow pace, but so far its working.

Sometimes data is not correctly restored causing CRC errors or errors in reading the file. Re-recovering it using GetDataBack sometimes works. I have had to re-download some files due to their size, and I tried using All Media Fixer, but the freeware version sucks. =/

not sure ,should be a box that allows to set ignored file sizes
anything under such and such size will be ignored same with file ext.
hope you get most of your stuff back
thanks for updates sometimes after helping we don't see or hear end results

So... my primary Hard drive (the one with the boot partition) has suffered catastrophic failure. It spins and is recognized by the system. but I think one of the heads are broken, as I cannot read or right from the drive, nor can anything even access it (explorer, Disk management, they all lock up until I forcefully disconnect the drive). =(

I'll try reading it on a linux system since I've heard of drives that could no longer be read in windows could be in Linux, but it probably won't help.

The good news, is that before the hard drive died I had made a Norton Ghost back up of the IBM service partition on it a day or two before it failed, and I have a 3 month old ghost backup up my Boot partition. The work I had done over the past couple weeks are basically scrapped.

I'll recover eventually. at least the data on the trouble drive that this thread was made for seems to be okay still. =)