Nija

So last night I'm winding down, and playing Delta Force: Task Force Dagger, on my main PC. It loads up a new mission and I hear *click click* then what sounds like a power drain for a second, then everything goes back to normal, but my game has frozen. So I wait a few seconds. Then I end up waiting about a minute for anything to respond.

I keep playing, until I die, and then I shut the game down. It's been a long night, so I leave my computer running (like I've done since I built it).

Fast forward to this morning. I come into my room to get my clothes to get dressed and my screen says, "Disk boot failure, please insert system disc and press enter"

Nuts. I stick the XP Pro disc in, and reboot. I bring it into the repair console and run chkdsk. I leave for work. The girl comes home at noon and says it's been on 25% since she's been home, so I tell her to turn it off and I'll deal with it when I get home. Now I've been meaning to do some cleaning, so I figure this might be a good time to get rid of the little dust bunnies. I pull all 3 harddrives out, and the cd-rw drive. pull them out of their enclosures and dust them off, as well as the fans, in the intake ports, etc.

Anyways, I reconnect the IDE cable to the system drive (I leave to the other drives unplugged, but with power going to them) the BIOS recognizes the Western Digital 80gig drive (special edition). After the Asus A7n8x deluxe with xp2100+ POST ok sounds, it goes into what seems to by a secondary BIOS of some sort, getting hardware MAC address for some unidentified things, and then it comes up with the same boot disk failure message. I've changed the cable (ata100) to the one the slaves were running and the same thing.

Everytime I boot up now, I hear, what sounds like the harddrive power up, then power down, then power up. I think it sounds like it's died, and that's what everything's pointing me towards (I'm posting from my linux box right now )

This sucks.

The other two drives are FAT32 and are mostly filled up with games, music, pr0n, etc. so I can't even install windows on one of those and copy everything over in a last attempt. So I guess the next time I have some cash and a nice harddrive is on sale I will have to buy it, unless anyone has some suggestions

/rant

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"Nija is the dark soul of gotapex. We don't like to talk about him." - LPMiller

bachviet

Sorry to hear about the hard drive. Can you RMA the drive? The SE drives come with 3 year warranty.

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Jeffbx

There's a good article at techrepublic.com - 200 ways to recover from a drive failure. Unfortunately, the link seems to be broken at the moment, but check back because it's one of their most popular articles. There are some great tips on getting a dead drive back up & running.

mcs328

I put mine is two ziploc bags for several hours in the freezer. It was ice cold to the touch. Then I attatched it to an external enclosure. It worked and then I saved all I could. After it warmed it up it started dying.

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Nija

Here's what I'm thinking about:

I run down to BB or CompUSA and purchase 200GB of pure Seagate love (Best buy link ) and make that my system drive (after some partioning) and then hook up the dying HD to one of the secondary cables, and just copy everything over that I want. I figure I bought the Original 80GB drive for $80, and now I'm doubleing it's capacity for $60's more, that's a fairly decent thing.

The only thing I'm worried about, is would I need one of those card thingy (i can't remember the name off the top of my head) that I would have to plug the new seagate drive into a PCI slot to make it be recognized. . .

DarkFury

Maybe their web server "drive" crashed.

Sorry to hear about your drive there Nija... hopefully you had a Norton Ghost backup.

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Markel

Why couldn't you put the 2 drives as Master and Slave on a single IDE cable? When I had a hard drive fail, I was able to set it as a slave and boot off another drive so I could copy what I wanted from the bad drive, but for some reason I had to boot to safe mode to keep the boot process from trying to "look" at the bad area of the slave drive during bootup (the failing area was under the /windows path - if I stayed away from reading there, I was ok).

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Nija

I was figuring I would need one of those cards since I would have everything else hooked up (1 cd-rw, 2 slave HDD [to copy the data to] the new system drive, and the dying one) I thought a little more about it, and I don't think I'll need the controller card. I can probably fit all the important data onto one of the storage drives. I was at BB today, and I was looking to make sure they had the Seagate instock (they did) so I also was looking at controller cards, and jeez, those things were almost $60. daaaayuuuuum, I don't need one right now, according to my budget

And DF, no I don't have norton anything on my anything =\

Fun times. . .

DarkFury

Dayuuum... that truly sux0rs...

So after you get this fixed... maybe you should invest in a copy. I hear that Outpost.com has a great deal on it (Norton Systemworks Pro actually... which includes Ghost, although you probably won't qualify for the "upgrader" portion of the rebates...)

I'd HIGHLY recommend that you get a copy of Ghost... It is a lifesaver and a stress reliever.

Kevster

Nija, if you need some help, PM me. I have a few tricks to help get your data off that drive. We could probably fix it this weekend.

Jeffbx - I have that file for 200 ways to rescue a Hard Drive. It's actually only about 40 ways, they just have a lot of suggestions that amount to 200 total saying essentially the same thing. When I get a chance I'll find it and post it.

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I think over again
My small adventures, my fears.
The small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.

And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing:

To live to see the great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.

-old Inuit song

Jeffbx

Nija, unless you're in a real hurry don't buy that stuff at BestBuy...

You can get that same drive at Newegg.com for $113. If you need a 2nd IDE controller, you can also grab one of those for about $25.

Nija

Damnit, Jeffbx I was resisting looking online for that very reason. I succumbed to the peer pressure, and purchased it. If I'm lucky I will get it today or tomorrow.

Kevster heh, I live upstairs now, I just want you see you have to go up and down them /evil

Kevster

Stairs are no problem - as you know, my house is full of stairs and I've become quite skilled at them. PM me if you want some help with this over the weekend.

Markel

Too bad you didn't get in on the $23 200GB WD deal from Dell. If you called up WD, you also got a PCI controller card as part of the package. (Hmmm, I wonder if I'll ever even use that thing.) Were those just PCI IDE controllers you were looking at, or PCI Raid cards?

brainsmile

I still have the pci controller sitting around

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