Primary EIDE Controller problem

Dempsey

I have a Dell PC here and I'm being given the following error on boot up.

It goes something like this, "Dell's Disk Monitoring System has detected that Drive 0 on the primary EIDE controller is operating outside normal specification. Its advisable to back up all data and replace the hard disk drive by calling us robbing b*stards".

F1 - Continue
F2 - Setup Utility

F1 - gives me another error stating that windows could not start because of a disk hardware configuration problem. It could not read from the boot disk Check manuals, etc

F2 - Goes into the bios, asking for a setup password, I never set one nor did the owner ( would dell?) and then when I exit I get the error that F1 gives.

Do I have any chance or fixing this hard drive or getting life out of it so data can be retrieved?

allybhoy

Sounds like the disk is on its last legs, my advice would be to whip it out ASAP and slave it in a non dell pc and see if it detects it. If it does try and ghost it, u might get lucky!

anthony4335

Try booting up using a boot disk, and use fdisk to fix the MBR, I think the command is fdisk mbr, but it is a long time since I have had this issue. As for the bios the only thing you can do is either contact dell or clear the cmos

Dempsey

I'll see if I can fix the MBR first, because he said there wasnt any performance issues before the problem, usually the disk performance degrades before failure.

Now to find a floppy disk...

10-10-20

This is a SMART pre-warning failure. Basically, the disk was flagged as clocking up errors which were increasing. It has not either failed or has corrupted the data (sounds like head read/write failure or contamination on the platter due to a head-strike).

Boot up using the Linux Live CD's and see if you can recover the data. Do this as quickly as you can as the problem may only get worse.

Dempsey

system32\drivers\pci.sys was corrupt

Gonna try and repair it with the XP CD

10-10-20

OK, do that and then bin the disk... It's on the way out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology

Dempsey

Ok, im crap at DOS, how do I copy/repair system32\drivers\pci.sys from the XP CD.

After I repair the installation, I'm going to run Western Digital's Diognostic Tool on the drive, if that shows a problem, i'll back up data.

Binning the disk is the last resort

Dempsey

I've put the hard drive into my PC, its running fine. I tried going to the system32\drivers\ folder and then it asked me to format the drive, I said no and now I'm doing a scan disk. Another strange thing is that it says the folder is empty when it should have 39Mb of files.