Hi all, A friend gave me a suspect samsung HDD 40 gig. I slaved it to my maxtor and booted up. On came a warning from the S.M.A.R.T feature of my mobo.

<<< slave samsung hard disk in bad state. backup your data and replace disk.imminent failure expected. F1 to continue and del to enter setup >>>>

I continued, it booted ok, I shut down, and removed the samsung.

My questions:--

(1) will it be safe to attempt a recovery of some data if not all, or will it crash my whole system?

(2) if safe which method? access the samsung, locate the files, drag and drop to my hdd? (the problem here is the samsung has win xp pro and my o/s is win 98 SE.) will this have any effect?

(3) I have drive image version 4.0 (ex partition magic but now symantec I think)
will it be better and faster (before the samsung crashes) if I take this route.

(4) or do I freeze it(samsung) for sometime and attempt recovery and will the chances be better.

(5) any other safe method?

All I want is not to crash my system in the process.

Any input will be gratefuly accepted.

Good Day to all----Venkat

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml