CRC Data Error

Recently I had Vista blue screen on me, citing a 'Data Error: Cyclic Redundancy Check." I had to restart and reinstall a few applications, but during the installation I ran into the same error during installation, again something about that redundancy check. Eventually shit happens and I had to reinstall my OS (downgraded to XP) and now as XP the same disk that my OS was on has problems holding (namely when I was trying to save a 3GB torrent on it) large amounts of data, again the error is cited as the Cyclic Redundancy crap.

Anyways preliminary research tells me the CRC error is due to either bad data or some kind of physical problem with the disk. If its something physical wrong with the disk I have an external hard drive to fall back on for now. But I would still like to know if there is anyway to recover the HDD, the disk represents about 50 or so gigs of space that at the moment I can't touch (I'm on a laptop by the way, so that space counts for something). Anyone know of anyway besides sending my computer to a repair shop to deal with this CRC error? I've heard something about Spinrite but I haven't gotten too deep with it yet.

Anyone have any experience in dealing with this error?

Oh, and one more thing on a rather unrelated note, on my external hard drives the folders are set to Read-Only, I change them, windows shows that its changed the attribute, but once I hit okay and the properties windows goes away apparently the Read-Only is still there. I can't seem to make that go away, any tips on that?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by mortis

It sounds like a hard drive failure to me. A CRC check basically is where they check the bits to see if things come out the way they should. If the count of bits is wrong, then there is an error. If Windows is giving you these problems, even AFTER reinstalling things, I am forseeing it to be your hard drive.

Why can't you access the data itself exactly? Is it just not there, or are you getting errors, or is XP not loading up?

Actually after the first blue screen I uninstalled a few programs that needed a restart, however when I did restart Vista decided to run ChkDsk and after the ChkDsk Utility ran Vista started to boot right into a blue screen and automatically restarting. XP so far has booted up without failure. As for the data, I haven't tried accessing any CRC error data, I merely can't write onto the disk after a certain amount of data has been processed (I've tried installing a program around 1.5gigs or so, didn't work, CRC error, tried to save a torrent on the disk, again CRC error stopped it).

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

I suggest you stop accessing the recalcitrant hard disk at once, and use SpinRite on it to recover data pronto.

Would that include whatever partitions that are on it? Also after I use spinrite should I still avoid using the HDD? I was told Spinrite would to some degree fix the error, but I may just be reading too much inbetween the lines.

There's nowhere I can't reach.