Hard Disk Crash

Belzie

I think my Hard Disk has crashed today.

The symptoms are:-

1. gets stuck 'auto dectecting Pri-Master......not detected

2. auto detecting Pri-slave........not detected

3. I can boot the computer from a floppy disk and I get a A:> prompt ..... but I cannot get to any other drive. I'm not certain if I should be able to 'cos my hard disk is formatted NTSC not FAT32 so maybe I wouldn't be able to see anything from a:>.

I wonder if anyone can suggest ways of fixing this cheaply if possible. I expect I will have to buy a new hard disk 160G or more .

My big concern is will I be able to retrieve any data from the disk....... I have lots of photos and family movies on it all my email......... even some money accounts which wll be a lot of trouble to find again......... random generated passwords by roboform.

Help......HELP.......HELP!!!!![/size]

Belzie

StrikeEagle

You could open up the case, with the pc off, and see if any cables have come loose.

There should be a 4 wire cable (with black,yellow,red wires) power cable, that goes into the hard drive and a very wide + thin 40pin cable. Try removing these cables and then put them back in (they fit one way only). Then re-sit the other end of the 40pin from the motherboard.

Could just be they got shaken loose, or there is some crud on the connections.

Belzie

Thanx StrikeEagle

I've already done that 2 or 3 times. Then I took the HD out and left it outside to get really cold for an hour.

When I put it back in it started to boot normally got to the Windows starting window got stuck there and the rebooted itself.............then it was back to the original not recognizing the HD.

This comforts me a little in that it may only be the boot trackes that are knackered and may data may still be ok.

I wonder if there is anyway of reinstalling the boot tracks............. can anyone tell me how?

belzie

hollie.weimeraner

It sounds as though your drive has reached the end of its life.  I read an article about recovering data from dead drives a couple of years ago.  One of the ways of recovering data was by popping the drive into an airtight bag and leaving it in the freezer for a period of time.  This method was successful on a number of drives but does actually come with a "health warning" as condensation can form in the drive which may cause short circuits.

It does explain why your cold drive may go through the process of booting up though.

If you have a cold garage why not move your computer outside for the night and see if it boots?  You may be able to recover your data if not your drive.

maninblack_3

ok.
dont go putting it in freezers or anything like that
all old wives tales and you can do more harm than good with the effects or condensation and more banging around.
Firstly the drive is a write off. Forget about it using it practially again.
Good news is you can get a new 160 gb hard disk for about £60.
If you have important data on it it can be quite easily retrieved. This can be done by getting a new disk installing an operating system on it and then adding old disk to system and then copying the data off it. This is always the safest way and i have a lot of success with it.
If you need any further help or info then PM me and i will do what i can

maninblack

culpepper

to fix the masterboot record in XP...
boot from the XP CD
choose win xp
type R
at the command prompt type FIXMBR
type Y press enter
type exit

john-boi

One great way of checking a damaged disc is to use a live Linux CD.

Now don't panic all you window users ( I'm one too)

go here to read about it and download

http://www.knoppix.net/about.php

You burn the ISO image to a CD and pop it in the offending PC this will load a linux OS into your RAM NOT using your Hard drive BUT it can read whats on the hard drive and it has the ability to burn files onto CD

This has got me out of a few scrapes with inaccesable hard drives

maninblack_3

Fixing the MBR is only a temporary solution if the disk is on its way out it is goibg to fail again soon and maybe with more problems.
Using a distribution like Knoppix is a good idea if you quickly want to rescue some important data. Not sure if KNoppix does auto mounts and if not you are goign to have to look at how to use the mount command
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda /mnt/disk
is your syntax but you will have to replace hda with your hard disk and disk with where you want to mount it too.
You are probably goign to need to know how to burn a cd from a command line

maninblack

irnbru_2

I think my Hard Disk has crashed today.

The symptoms are:-

1. gets stuck 'auto dectecting Pri-Master......not detected

2. auto detecting Pri-slave........not detected

Your BIOS is failing to find the drive ..... which doesn't neccessarily mean the drive is knackered.

Go into the bios and find the HDD menu and try the user option - see this thread for a similar complaint.

Additionaly, try the drive fitness test as well.

Does the primary slave normally have anything connected to it?

As you've got an NTFS formatted drive, which OS are you using? Win2K, WinXP ?

culpepper

I know this is probably irrelevant but recently I changed my motherboard and my hardrive was not recognised in the Bios nor my second drive but both the CD drives were.
After a bit of faffing about,I swapped the IDE cables over so that the CD Drives had the hard drives IDE cable and Visa Versa wierdly,the Bios could see all the drives as soon as I did it.

Belzie

Hello Folks

Thanx for all your answers.

I bought a new HD today, (160gig Hitachi deskstar.....£58). There was a slightly cheaper £55 Maxtor but my crashed disk is Maxtor so thought I'd try something different. I noticed my crashed disk was manufactured Nov 2003, so it managed 13 months!!!!!! As soon as the new Hitachi was plugged in the system regognised it immediately and its now installed with windows XP.

I tries connecting up the Maxtor as a slave so that I could look for the data I want. It isn't recognised so I can't get at my data at the moment.

For the next couple of days I'll concentrate on installing programs and stuff. After that I want to see if I can get my files..........I feel if I can get the system to recognise the disk my files will be there ok.

Also so I dont encounter this situation again I'm thinking of getting a second HD to mirror all the data. Does anyone know how to do this........I've seen references to RAID but don't know what it does or how to set it up. I think it would be worth it if its just the cost of another HD........knowing myself any attempt to do regular backups......well I'm just not that kind of person!!!!

Thanks again for all the help..

Oh and if anyone out there is confident they can retrieve my data please PM me I am willing to pay you.

BTW the disk crashed whist running a defragmentation program.......... could this have anything to do with it crashing?

Belzie