Page fault in nonpaged area, hard drive is the cause, now what?

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I have a client computer that got the page fault in nonpaged area error. I tried everything, including booting to WinXP CD, safe mode, even my ERD Commander disk. Changed the memory, disconnected all PCI, AGP and IDE devices. Nothing could boot this computer! So i told the poor guy - it's gotta be the motherboard. It's a shuttle mini PC so I told him basically you're looking at $300 or so including labor to fix, so just get a $400 new Dell PC.

So he got the new PC today and I took the old HD out to recover data. Put it into my external drive caddy, connect it to the new PC, and what happens? Invalid page fault crash! Plugged it into a laptop, invalid page fault!

So! The drive clearly is the problem. Anyone have a suggestion about how to get their data off the drive? It's pretty important stuff.

Thanks!

Cameron
 
If you can't connect it to any system without getting fatal errors, I'm afraid the drive and it's data is toast. You might be able to change the hard drives circuit boards and get the drive to run. You would have to find a drive just like the one you have... This is probably an electrical problem and not a mechanical failure. What make is the drive? Most hard drive failures are mechanical
 
Yeah I know, that's what has surprised me. The drive appears fine physically. It's a common drive, but I'm not really willing to break a second drive just to get it working, when I know that probably won't work since I've never done it before anyway.

I wonder if I can fdisk it and then use a data recovery program to scan the sectors... I've been using getdataback recently and been pretty impressed.
 
Many computer repair shops have boxes and boxes of bad hard drives. These drives can be used for board replacement parts. There is commonly only 1 circuit board on many of them.

If you can access the bad drive in DOS you may be able to work at getting the data off. The only other option is to pay big bucks to a data recovery service. Many drive manufacturers offer this service
 
The drive is NTFS, so that takes away the DOS option. I can look into taking it to a shop but I don't really think there are those kind of shops around me in DC here. Very hard to find a small computer shop, and there's no way the big box stores can handle anything more complicated than reformatting.
 
You can create a floppy boot disk that will enable NTFS reading, but I really think with this type of failure, the drive will not be accessable until it's logic board is replaced. I can, and I have done this many times... getting the drive to read just long enough to get the data off
 
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