HDD dramas, any (helpful) suggestions ???

[Guzziboy]

Feckin 'puters

The story goes like this,

I hardly ever turn the computer off, in fact it only gets restarted when the windows updates require it to do so.

Woke up this morning, went to check the forum, and the browser (safari) won't run. Got home from work this afternoon, same story, everything else runs ok though. Did a virus scan (Kaspersky) and a spyware scan ( superantispyware) with clear results on both. Thought to myself, try a shutdown/ restart................

I now have the problem that my computer does not even see the hard drive at all, so as a result I get a boot fault as the system does not recognize that it has a boot disk.

I took the hard drive from the kid's computer and tried that, no problems at all, boots up and runs fine. Tried my disk in the kid's computer.....nada. So I appear to have gone from an operating computer with one program not working to a totally dead hard drive, just by shutting down and restarting-how the fuck does that work??

Next drama, nothing was backed up anywhere,( yes, I know!!!!) so all the family photos and music are on a disk drive that is, for all intents and purposes, now a handy paperweight

Any of you gurus out there know of a way to get to all the stuff on the disk, or know of somewhere that may be able to help? Could this be a result of a virus or similar thing getting into the boot sector of the disk or just a drive suddenly dying ?

[polonY]

Depending on what is at fault, you can try chucking the harddrive in an airtight ziplock bag, making sure you squeeze all the air out, and chuck it in the cold bit of the fridge for a while. After youve done this you may have a small window of opportunity of which you can boot up and backup important documents. I have managed to do this process four times on one dead harddrive before it died completely.

Of course theres heaps of other things that can go wrong that this procedure wont solve.

The reason for doing this is that the part of the harddrive that reads shit can bend a bit and start touching the surface of the disc. The cold makes the metal contract and lifts up the needle a little bit, allowing data to be read while it is still cold.

[Stoneville]

oh no that is not good, have you been given the evil eye yet???

[D'Artagnan]

Put the HDD in your kids computer as the second disk, boot off kids HDD, copy everything you can off (first) then try some scans etc.

[Fat Pat]

There's a mob in Perth somewhere who claim they can recover data from crashed drives, Forget the name, but surely a quick google could sort it out..

Scratch that, here are a few I found...

Data Recovery Perth ? Western Australia - Ontrack Data Recovery

Hard Drive Recovery Perth | Technetics Data Recovery

Best of luck.

[Barfridge]

The data recovery places are stupidly expensive. Try the freezer trick first, it can work wonders (for a little while at least).

when you replace the drive, please get another external drive for backups.

[Guzziboy]

oh no that is not good, have you been given the evil eye yet???

Sure have . this is the computer that gets the emails, and is the only one in the house that the missus and the eldest daughter can use to access facebook

Put the HDD in your kids computer as the second disk, boot off kids HDD, copy everything you can off (first) then try some scans etc.

I take it that this is after putting it in the fridge, it doesn't get recognized even as a second drive at the moment.

There's a mob in Perth somewhere who claim they can recover data from crashed drives, Forget the name, but surely a quick google could sort it out..

Scratch that, here are a few I found...

Best of luck.

Thanks for those links, if all else fails they will be hearing from me.

[Guzziboy]

when you replace the drive, please get another external drive for backups.

Funnily enough, I have been talking about doing that for a while now........

[Jack0207]

Try Spectrum data for hard drive recoveries. Have used them twice before. Does cost a fair bit but what is the cost of family photos......

if you continue to keep booting up that HDD and there is physical damage to the disk you are only doing more damage to the HDD which will make it even more costly to recover. If the HDD makes any sort of ticking/scraping noise turn the power of immediately.

Other word of warning - DO NOT use any software recovery program as these will only scramble the info further.

[zed7fiddy]

I take it that this is after putting it in the fridge, it doesn't get recognized even as a second drive at the moment.

I don't know how much you know about computers so forgive me if this is a bit off the mark:

Is it an older PATA drive? did you check the jumper settings on the back of the drive before trying it as a second drive? You'd have to change it from master to slave for it to be recognised as the second drive.

[D'Artagnan]

I take it that this is after putting it in the fridge, it doesn't get recognized even as a second drive at the moment.

Hmmm that says electronics rather than boot sector / MBR issues to me. Get professional help.

Oh and when you do get an external backup HDD, I've got some backup scripts that do nightly, weekly and monthly backups (inc, full and last day of month full) if you want them.

D'art

[Guzziboy]

Is it an older PATA drive?

No, it's .....sorry it WAS a SATA drive

[polonY]

oh and btw, i like to use the cold part of the fridge caus my freezer is mutantly cold and i dont like the excessive condensation that forms, i'd reccommend that you use your freezer. im just being a girl

[Ferris]

Another thing to note is that it could also be tied into a fuct psu. if your faulty hdd, which is forever spinning, has shot bearings, then if your psu is faulty you may not have enough oomph to spin it upto speed again fighting against the fuct bearings in the hdd initially.

[Gryphen]

I use EASUS Data Recovery for recovering data, as long as you can see the drive under computer management (administrative tools) then this app can usually recover files..

[Cone Cat]

It sounds like to me that the problem could be a munted HDD PCB board. HDD's have a PCB on them which has a chip storing the boot up data as well as control circuitry, drive motor control, read head control etc.
Would explain why the drive worked untill you powered down then it wouldn't reboot. On boot up the drive sends it's drive parameters to your computer so it can interact with the hard drive. If the computer doesn't recieve this info from the HDD, ie the PCB part that stores this info has failed since the last boot up, then you get boot fail. Your computer will retain this info once it has booted up and only require it again on reboot.

Solution and one of the tricks that the data recovery companies use is to change the PCB on the hard drive which could actually repair the HDD. Seeing that its Sata, it's not that old. But unless your pretty handy at electronics repair, changing a HDD pcb is not a job you should attempt.

The other technique the date recovery people use is putting your drive into a dustless enclosure, opening the drive and transfering your platters into another working drive.

[Jonchilds]

If the device is visible during POST, but not after - it's likely that your PCB is OK and it's a head/platter issue.

[Guzziboy]

So far, the HDD is not visible during post, even when putting the drive in another computer as the second drive.

Just getting set up to try out the old "HDD in the freezer" trick, not expecting any change in results, but you never know.

[Jonchilds]

Does the drive spin up and or make any clicking noises when you power the PC on?

[zed7fiddy]

Hey all, as this is on HDD access issues thought I'd throw in a couple of questions:

Trying to fix a laptop for a mate but having a few problems. It's a toshiba portege, 5 or 6 years old I think. It started with a stack dump during normal XP operations and since then I haven't been able to load it up properly, reformat or even reinstall windows. I think it's a hardware issue - it's the 0x000000F4 dump (which I believe is HDD or RAM).

When I try to reinstall windows it can't access the partition and says "cannot access disk". I can get into it through the recovery console but can't do much as I can't format it from there. When I try to load up windows normally or in safe mode it says that /win/system32/l_init.nls is corrupt - I'm in the process of using
the "windows ultimate boot disk" found here to try and access the second partition and back up info before I mess with much else. I may be able to use some features of the boot program to reformat it but the prospects don't look good. This is the second time it's happened so reliability is down the toilet.

Once I back up the info it doesn't really matter what else happens - but I'd like to be able to get it fixed if possible. Any ideas?

EDIT: The other problem is that it's rediculously slow - it took 25 mins to load the boot disk and is going on 10 mins to get into my computer (if it will ever get into it). It only has 512MB Ram, but when it was running it was at least decent enough to use normally.