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HDD gone south

  • 23-03-2004 3:04pm
    #1
    Da Man
    Closed Accounts Posts: 193 ✭✭


    I have this PC that started acting up and I suspect the C: HDD. It would intermittently not boot, intermittently crash, scandisk would intermittently hang etc. So I took out the disk and figured putting it in another machine as a slave drive would help me analyze it as it wouldn't affect boots etc. Well, that machine started acting up too where XP wouldn't start consistently and if I tried to run scandisk against the drive when the machine decided to boot, the whole machine would hang.

    I'm guessing the disk is in a pretty bad state and that XP does a health check on all drives on bootup and sometimes this doesn't work too well. I suppose I don't have much faith in Windows generally speaking, so I'm willing to believe that running Scandisk can hang a PC if the disk is damaged.

    The problem is that I want to recover as much of the faulty drive as possible and then just replace it and get on with life. It just seems that whenever I start accessing a lot of files on the drive the system seems to hang. I can browse directories and stuff like that.

    Any suggestions for how to approach this? I have a Linux box I can hook up the drive to as well, if that's of any use.


Comments

  • #2
    Hobart
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,839 ✭✭✭Hobart


    did you check it for viruses? Sounds like thats your problem.


  • #3
    leeroybrown
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,563 ✭✭✭leeroybrown


    Get the drive test and repair tool for your specific manufacturers drives. The repair tool will allow you to create a standalone boot floppy that you can use to test (and possibly) fix the drive.

    UltimareBootCD (~50Mb) has most of these on it and its homepage also gives linkes to each one of these tools for a smaller download:

    http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

    I've had good success with these tools before.


  • #4
    Mutant_Fruit
    Closed Accounts Posts: 4,943 ✭✭✭Mutant_Fruit


    Put it in on a seperate IDE controller to the drive that contains your OS install. Basically, if you have 2 hardrives on one cable, and two cd-roms on the other, unplug both cd-roms and put the dodgy hardrive on that cable.

    Then just try and copy the stuff off the drive normally. If that doesnt work, i can nearly guarentee you nothing will. The HD sounds like its in a very bad state. If you had tried taking the stuff off it immediately you would have had a much better chance.


  • #5
    Da Man
    Closed Accounts Posts: 193 ✭✭Da Man


    I tried putting it on a separate channel but it doesn't show up at all then. If I stick as a slave drive, XP won't boot at all. It just hangs during boot. I suspect there's something wrong with the bus interface on that drive. It would be nice to be able to get some data off it, though, but I'm running out of options.


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