Hard disk failure

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Stoney, Mar 18, 2007.

  1. Stoney

    Stoney Megabyte Poster

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    Hi guys,

    I'm having a look at a mates pc, it's been blue screening quite a bit lately and now it wont boot at all.

    When you start the pc it stays on a dark screen for ages and then returns a System Error, opertaing system not found message.

    I'm running the recovery console off the XP CD and it took ages to finally load. Now when I run chkdsk it gives me the message "The specified drive is not valid, or there is no disk in the drive".

    I'm going to try running the hard disk in another machine to make sure that it's not a motherboard issue or similar.

    I'm thinking the hard drive has failed but was just after a bit of advice for any other tests I should run to rule out other bad hardware.

    Thanks,

    Paul
     
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  2. AJ

    AJ 01000001 01100100 01101101 01101001 01101110 Administrator

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    The first thing to try is to slave it into another machine and see if it will recognise the drive. If it does copy the data over and the do a diskcheck on that drive and get it to repair whatever it can. You never know that may just get it going again.
     
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  3. zebulebu

    zebulebu Terabyte Poster

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    Sound advice but, tbh, if you can get the data off the disk your mate may as well just go out and buy a new HDD - a 40Gb drive is only about 30 quid nowadays and your mate would be better off having a pristine new O/S install on a brand new disk than run the risk of getting the old one up and running only for it to punk out again in a couple of months.

    In my experience, once a disk has started going bad its much less grief in the long run just to replace it.
     
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  4. AJ

    AJ 01000001 01100100 01101101 01101001 01101110 Administrator

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    Can't argue with that Zeb. A new drive with a new OS will be alotbetter than trying to use a drive that may fail again after a while.

    Still it's worth the effort to extract the data.
     
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  5. UCHEEKYMONKEY
    Honorary Member

    UCHEEKYMONKEY R.I.P - gone but never forgotten. Gold Member

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    What about the IDE cables?

    Could they be faulty or not connected properly

    Also what about the jumper settings, are they set for Master?

    Zeb - true it's cheaper to buy another HD but is this really the problem? What if the new HD shows the same error message?:blink
     
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  6. Bluerinse
    Honorary Member

    Bluerinse Exabyte Poster

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    That's why you would slave it in another box, to test your theory that the drive is faulty.
     
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  7. UCHEEKYMONKEY
    Honorary Member

    UCHEEKYMONKEY R.I.P - gone but never forgotten. Gold Member

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    Hmm can a NTFS drive be read with another NTFS drive as a primary or is it only FAT32 drives that can be read with other operating systems?
     
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  8. AJ

    AJ 01000001 01100100 01101101 01101001 01101110 Administrator

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    So long as windows can see the drive it will read it. The version of windows will determine what type of file system it can see
     
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  9. UCHEEKYMONKEY
    Honorary Member

    UCHEEKYMONKEY R.I.P - gone but never forgotten. Gold Member

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    If the window system files are corrupted such as the Kernal or DLL's can the data still be recovered or would you have to use a HEX editor?
     
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  10. AJ

    AJ 01000001 01100100 01101101 01101001 01101110 Administrator

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    If it was me I'd slave the drive onto another PC. Boot the pc and you will see the foreign drive an "My Computer"

    Open it up and copy the Docs and Settings folder. This will copy all of the data in the My Docs folder + all other stuff. Then put the drive back into the other PC and reload windows.

    That's only if your version of windows can read the file system though.
     
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  11. Raffaz

    Raffaz Kebab Lover Gold Member

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    Make sure the cables arent loose (it could have been knocked). You could also goto the HDD manufacturers website and download their diagnostic tools. Is there any more info about the error your getting, like a stop code?
     
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