Hard Disk crash, advice needed

[Falesh]

Hi there,

I've just been doing some maintenance on my machine and I think the Hard Disk may have died. I set the computer to do a Scan Disk and look for and fix any bad sectors it found, I left it doing that and when I came back it had finished and was on the desktop. Then I set it to defrag and started surfing the net. At some point the computer hung completely so I hit restart.

The computer failed to restart windows properly saying something about not being able to load PCI.dll (I can't quite remember what it said) and suggested I tried restarting with the windows CD and pressing r. I did a restart and it said the same thing, so I used the windows CD to do a recovery (the press r thing) and tried CHKDSK. This got to 50% and said there was 1 unrecoverable problem (I think) on the drive. I did another restart and this time it said about being unable to load dll for kernal (something like that) and didn't even suggest trying the Windows CD recovery.

Giving up on repair I tried to install windows again but it said that it couldn't install without formatting the drive. I want to save the data on the drive so I have just put the Hard Disk into my mothers computer. I booted it up and checked windows explorer (I probably needed to go into the BIOS first but since I am only self taught I like to try the simple things first :), but the drive wasn't there. So I went into the BIOS and tried to auto detect the drive, but my mothers computer has just hung trying to do that.

I have had a problem similar to this before with this drive, but it was just bad sectors killing some files and I was able to fix it with CHKDSK. Does anyone think this may be bad sectors in just the wrong place or something more serious? Also does anyone know any other way I can try to get the data of my drive?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks!

John Baldock

[Darthtanion]

Re: Hard Disk crash, advice needed

First off, you'll need to make sure the OS on both systems will allow you to see the drive in question. Remember that Win9x is not compatible with the NTFS file system. You didn't mention anything regarding this so I will start off with it.

Secondly, (assuming the two machines should be able to see the data on both hard drives) make sure you set the jumpers on the drive from your box to SLAVE. If you fail to do this, then your mother's system won't see the second drive since they will both be fighting to be the boss. Also double check the hard drive in your mom's system to make sure you don't need to set another jumper on that one to force it to be a master in a dual drive setup.

If these quick fixes don't solve your problem then we'll be looking at something more in depth and it may be the data is not going to be recoverable.

[Falesh]

Re: Hard Disk crash, advice needed

Thanks for the reply. The operating systems are both Win XP (using NTFS). I did set the broken hard drive to slave, but I didn't even think about changing my mothers. Checking it now though it is set appropriately, sadly.

[Falesh]

Re: Hard Disk crash, advice needed

One other question. Once this is over would it be wise to try and use the same hard drive (if it usable at all) to install Windows on again, or would it be better to buy a new one?

[maximus7001]

Re: Hard Disk crash, advice needed

One other question. Once this is over would it be wise to try and use the same hard drive (if it usable at all) to install Windows on again, or would it be better to buy a new one?

Go to the drive makers site and get their diagnostic utility, then run it.

And another thing, why would you use the computer while it is trying to defrag? Thats just asking for it.

[Falesh]

Re: Hard Disk crash, advice needed

I ran the Diag tool and it said my Drive was failing and if I hadn't backed up the data I was screwed (well not in so many words ;). Oh well, new drive time. Thanks for the help, at least I know what the score now.

As an aside, I have never heard that it is wrong to use the comp while it is defraging. Is this something I should always avoid?

Thanks again,
John Baldock

[maximus7001]

Re: Hard Disk crash, advice needed

It's just one of those things not to do. What brand of drive was it? As far as replacement goes, I would recomend seagate, they have a 5 year warranty.

[Falesh]

Re: Hard Disk crash, advice needed

It was a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8. I've ordered a DiamondMax Plus 9 (8mb cache, 160GB) with a 3 year warranty. I've also set up some backing up procedures on the three computeres we have at home using a bat file (xcopy "C:\My Documents\FOLDER" "\\COMPUTER\backup\FOLDER" /s /k /r /h /y /i /d /z) so all critical data will now be on two hard drives. :)