Is my hard drive dead?

qs

Could be your power supply unit. I had a similar sounding problem a couple of months ago and the unit had failed. Cost about £25 to replace.

gom

tru

I tried the hard drive in the another pc, it starts to boot then goes to the blue screen of death and says 'A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer'. I had that problem about a year ago and sorted it out myself, trouble is I can't remember how I did it ::)

Joe_Bloggs

You should not be trying to boot of your 'moved' hard disk. This moved hard disk should be configured to be a slave (via jumpers on the back) if it has to share cable with an existing hard disk that boots the system.

It might be better to disconnect a CDROM/DVD drive that has its own cable and connect the 'moved' drive in place of a CD/ROM etc without any changes to jumper settings. Hopefully the rescue PC can read the disk information.

Some older operating systems such as win95/98/and winME will have problems win2000 or winXP operating systems if NTFS file systems are involved. Nothing is lost in this case, but the data recovery operation postponed untill something else is available.

scattycat_3

Troo when you try the drive in the other pc, change the suspect drive links from master to slave. Usually a group of 8 pins with one or two links in place , positions may be marked ms sl
If you put it in place of the cd, start the computer from its own drive then use My Computer to go to drive letter of cd, probably d.
Then you should be able to view contents if ok.

Good Luck

StrikeEagle

When a pc wont boot up its either because of the Power Supply/Graphics Card/Memory/Motherboard or CPU. If either of these fail, the computer will fail to POST.

If the fans are going it isnt the Power Supply. If you can see something on the monitor it isnt the Graphics card - You could always try swapping the graphics card between pc's to confirm it isnt the graphics card.

I'd say it's probably the ram. I would be tempted to take the memory out and re-seat it - just to make sure some crud/dust isnt interfering with it.

Oh ye, and I would definetly not have moved the hard-drive. If you get those jumpers wrong, and boot up, you can easily screw up ur hard-drive's master boot record. Not a good thing.

tru

Oh ye, and I would definetly not have moved the hard-drive.

Too late

I've replaced the CD Rom with the hard drive, I can rescue all files except Lotus (not too important) and Excel (very important, I've got a month's worth of a client's accounts on there). I can open a new excel page, but I can't rescue the saved one :-/

Joe_Bloggs

There is no point leaving a hard disk in a PC that will not post or boot. especially if it contains valuable data. The priority must be to protect the data by isolating if from the faulty PC and then recover the data using a working PC.

You never said what you did/did not do to access the files. Did you move any jumpers ? Did the CDROM share any other drive on its cable ? What letter does the replaced drive appear as ?

I doubt trying to boot from the disk in a different PC caused any problems. It is not advisable to try this however as the drivers will be the wrong type for the different hardware.
There may be hidden backup versions of the files you cannot open. Seek advice quoting the operating system and version of the software you are using. Do not try to write to your suspect hard disk. A Read only and write to another hard disk approach is advised. Therefore copy the information to another disk before trying to access it. There may be copies of your files that have been deleted but not overwritten by other information.
J_B.
PS are the two versions of whatever you are using compatable with each others files ?
 

tru

The replaced drive is F, the same as when the CD Rom was in.
A friend who added an extra hard drive to his own PC did mine for me, he mentioned jumpers (I think, I didn't really understand it). I copied the files I needed from Excel to the other hard drive but they won't open, however if I click 'new sheet' that works.

My C drive on this hard drive is NTFS, on the other it's FAT 32. Does that make a difference? All other files will open though, apart from Lotus and I'm not bothered about rescuing those files as much.

PS are the two versions of whatever you are using compatable with each others files ?

If you mean are the 2 versions of Office the same on both hard drives, then yes they are.

Joe_Bloggs

@Troo
Their still may be hidden backup files. It can be the default behavior of office to create a backup and hide it. Often it has a file extention that is not recognised by the application and is hidden from the user.

Files with extensions .XLB instead of .XLS (Worksheet)
.XLM instead of .XLK are backup alternative file extensions I have seen. The web does seem cluttered with excel data recovery advice requiring third party software. A search within the microsoft help files may be more profitable.

An NTFS capable operating system should have no trouble with FAT32.

J_B.

StrikeEagle

I doubt trying to boot from the disk in a different PC caused any problems. It is not advisable to try this however as the drivers will be the wrong type for the different hardware.

It wont work because any chipset differences will cause windows to blue screen before it loads the drivers.

I would have preferred to fix the pc that wont POST. Why create another sub-problem, instead of solving the first one?