Hard Drives corrupt

thewizard

this post is for two reasons:

1. BUMP
2. To tell everyone I am running a Memory Test from the Ubuntu Linux Live CD, if this passes I am going to try running Ubuntu off the Live CD, if this works then I have been told the problem is either

The hard drive(s)
The motherboard's Sata port(s)
The Sata Cable(s)

Will keep you posted, if anyone else has any help or suggestions please post it

Ice_2

well thanks everyone, I had all but given up on 2 pc's I was soucing together from afew bits I had left over and actually thought about spending even more money on a sata hard drive, as it should have just fired up and loaded xp and bobs your uncle just worked, but it didn't it was the B.S.O.D. :eek: everytime tried to boot it and it would go through the Bios then BSOD :eek: but after reading through some of these replys I checked the memory which was 2 odd ones and should have been the same so that was quickly rectified then after start up and Bios, the BSOD again so I put in a different hard drive and it is now formatting that hard drive so thanks to you guys I can now give this one to my brother for christmas.

wayhey lets see if the other one does the same.
or am I gonna be sat here scratching my head again.
:j :j :j

woohoo...

I am on the move in the new year, to a new house, so I have been getting rid if loads of stuff, free cycle and the local tip.
so I had all these things in the back room and decided that they could make 2 new pc's for someone who just wants to play the odd game and surf the net, do abit of shopping, that sort of thing.
so I thought but just couldn't get the blooming things to fire up, but now thanks to you guys I have.
you have made my day, thought I was losing it.
anyway my brother and his wife will be very grateful as there's is a mess that they have. and old from way back when pc's came installed with just 128mbs of ram.
woo those were the days...
:rotfl:
my how we have progressed since then.

Ice_2

thewizard wrote: »

this post is for two reasons:

1. BUMP
2. To tell everyone I am running a Memory Test from the Ubuntu Linux Live CD, if this passes I am going to try running Ubuntu off the Live CD, if this works then I have been told the problem is either

The hard drive(s)
The motherboard's Sata port(s)
The Sata Cable(s)

Will keep you posted, if anyone else has any help or suggestions please post it

I would try your memory it is surprising how a computer reacts to a bad section/conponent.
in my case it was the memory, my friend brought his old pc round the other day while I was on the floor putting these two together, so I must have picked up one stick that was his that was dodgy, I changed his memory and he machine just booted up no problem,
just like I have done with this one, I looked at the memory first and realised I'd put in 2 sticks that were totally different, and thats why it was going through the bios section then asking if I wanted to start windows in nornal mode then restarting soon after. the BSOD
now I am just loading windows xp on to a new drive.
working fine.
at the mo.

Ice_2

well everything seems to be ok with that machine I finished off yesterday morning, on to the next one now, so that should be a doddle now I know I mixed up the memorys.
silly me.

thewizard

I took my PC to my gf's house, her dad used Fdisk to format the drive because I don't have a copy of it.

While the drive was in his PC before it was formatted it was causing his PC to BSOD

I then managed to install XP on it again.

But my 1TB hard drive has been split into 4 partitions some how and I am going to have to use undelete software to get it back, but I am unsure how.

I also think I am going to have to format the other 2 drives using Fdisk once I have tried to recover the data.

But its really stressing me out now. So its not making my man flu any better lol

fwor

If you're not short of bandwidth, it may be worth downloading a copy of one of the Linux distros overnight. The Partion Editor (GPARTED) that comes installed on the Ubuntu LiveCD is graphical and easy to use, and you don't need to install anything on your hard drives - it simply runs off the LiveCD.

It supports most file systems including all the Windows ones (NTFS and all the FAT varieties) and is a whole lot easier to use than FDISK...

If you are short of bandwidth you can get it in much smaller bootable packages such as SystemRescueCD, but they can be a bit harder to use.

While the LiveCD is running, any attached disks and pendrives get mounted automatically, so you can copy the data you want to recover onto a pendrive, or write it to CD or another HDD.

spud17

thewizard wrote: »

this post is for two reasons:

1. BUMP
2. To tell everyone I am running a Memory Test from the Ubuntu Linux Live CD, if this passes I am going to try running Ubuntu off the Live CD, if this works then I have been told the problem is either

The hard drive(s)
The motherboard's Sata port(s)
The Sata Cable(s)

Will keep you posted, if anyone else has any help or suggestions please post it

fwor, 2nd your advice. it looks like he already has a live CD, but things like Gparted are not always obvious to the casual user.

I know, I'm one, but improving, I think.

Ice_2

thewizard wrote: »

I took my PC to my gf's house, her dad used Fdisk to format the drive because I don't have a copy of it.

While the drive was in his PC before it was formatted it was causing his PC to BSOD

I then managed to install XP on it again.

But my 1TB hard drive has been split into 4 partitions some how and I am going to have to use undelete software to get it back, but I am unsure how.

I also think I am going to have to format the other 2 drives using Fdisk once I have tried to recover the data.

But its really stressing me out now. So its not making my man flu any better lol

If your PC is still crashing.
Why?
click start
click Run...
type in
eventvwr.msc
to launch the event viewer.
Double-click on the "Critical, Error, and Warning Events"
view and look for recent errors,
they could tell you which program or device is causing the problems.
hths.

hope you feel better soon.

fwor

spud17 wrote: »

but things like Gparted are not always obvious to the casual user.

You're quite right there - I'm sure I'm not the only person to have completely trashed a filesystem by using a feature of GPARTED that I didn't understand...

And it does have some (apparently) quirky behaviour - for example many Linux distros (including Ubuntu) will auto-mount any drives that they find attached to the system. So when you unmount a volume in GPARTED to work on it, the kernel helpfully re-mounts it, and whatever changes you make fail. So you can need some careful timing to get that to work.

Fortunately you don't get that quirky behaviour when running the LiveCD, though.