Hard Drive Buggered! - H E L P ! !

sticker

My hard-drive sat down on me last night - Getting odd sounds from it.

Checked the ide and power cables - Definately beggered. I've been getting a few hangs also of late (probably should Have seen this coming!)

Problem showing when I boot - at "detecting IDE devices" in BIOS bootup: hanging, or booting up others and a "NONE" entry where my master should be... and being prompted to enter system disc.

I've three seperate hard drives atm - buggered one which is partitioned, and two others. I'm not sure which drive is the malfunctioning one - but have it narrowered down to two, so here's my plan:

Disconnect BOTH. Buy new one today.
going for:

this IDE from MARX Computers (they're formatting it for me also )
Samsung 200GB UDMA133 7200
Samsung SP2014N, UDMA133
Internal 3.5" IDE, 7200 rpm, 8MB cache
Euro 122.00 inc VAT

I'll buy a new IDE cable also... old one could probably do with an upgrade.

Quick question:

Is there any truth to the fact that putting a dodgy HD in a freezer / fridge give it enough life to pull any valubles off it if it's been unresponsive?

Many thanks in advance...

Conor.

jor el

sticker wrote:

Can I get a serial ATA drive for my windows drive while other drives are using IDE? Is S-ATA really worth it over IDE?

Em, what? If you're asking can you use SATA and ATA133 drives at the same time? Then yes, as long as the motherboard has SATA and parallel ATA connectors.

Is there a difference between ATA and ATA2 – will my motherboard support it? Mine being a DFI NFII ULTRA INFINITY - Link here

Never heard of ATA2

Does the regular power supply lead to the old IDE work with ATA2?

Standard Molex power connector should work on any drive.

Is there any truth to the fact that putting a dodgy HD in a freezer / fridge give it enough life to pull any valubles off it if it's been unresponsive?

It might work. Put it in a sealed freezer bag first, you don't want moisture getting in and freezing the heads to the disc. Then put it in the freezer for about an hour. It's not an exact science and it only works some of the time.

astrofool

IDE Ports will start disappearing off motherboards (Intel have already dropped one), but if its just a quick fix, sata might be too much hassle to add (controller, cables etc.). If you are looking to the future, upgrade wise, then sata might be worth it.

SATA controllers need a driver from a floppy disk generally (you press f6 during windows setup), newer Intel and Nvidia boards don't need a driver unless in RAID mode.

There's no problem mixing IDE with SATA, as they are essentially the same thing.

Your board has SATA on board, so no controller is needed, the motherboard should also come with the required cables for sata(if not, they are cheap anyway).

The freezer trick sometimes works, ts no harm at this stage. Boot it as a storage drive, rather than boot drive if recovering data.

zilog_jones

If you can get the PC to boot with these dodgy drives in them, try some program like SpeedFan to read the SMART monitor data from them - if there's big nasty red things on that, then I'd say their days are numbered.

And if your hard disks are definately dead, you can do this them! ^_^

sticker

Thanks all for the advice - gonna try the freezer first and see about backing up drive contents... Any recommendations as to good image apps?

Conor.

jor el

If freezing it works, you may not get long enough to image the drive. I'd suggest that you just copy off anything that you'd like to keep (important docs, pics, etc). Have a new disk with the OS installed on it running first, don't try booting from the dead/frozen drive. Then see if you can copy across to the new drive.

Good luck.

sticker

Came home and gave PC one more chance - she survived long enough to backup important files...

Old IBM deskstar BINNED and new 200gig up and running under fresh XP

Thanks for all the help