During my one and only hard drive failure, when nothing was accessible on the laptop's hard drive, booting with the emergency repair disk worked but the drive was not repairable.
Then I was able to use good old fashioned MS-DOS to 'see' the drive and access files. This gave me the opportunity to copy the files important to me. Then off it went to a shop (we were on the road so I didn't have all my computer trick stuff with me and didn't have access to the internet where we were in Yukon).
The shop tried all their tricks without success. So I reformatted the drive, reloaded the operating system and programs, copied back my files and carried on. The drive still continues to work without problem four years later.
