Computer help, will not boot

[Keith]

I just unplugged and replugged both harddrives, but that did not change anything.

It's too late to get deep into this tonight, and I'm in a bad mood. I think I'll go to bed and start fresh in the morning.

[Keith]

Legacy-TX and Hokie, I will send you a PM.

[Hokie]

In BIOS:
SATA-0 = NONE ( am guessing this HD has failed?)
SATA-1 = PBDS DVD +/-RW ....
SATA-2 = SATA Port not present
SATA-3 = SATA Port not present
SATA-4 = NONE
SATA-5 = ST35000320AS

looks like SATA-0 failed or got unplugged.

[47]

PM replied Keith

Holler at me tomorrow mid morning.

[Kevin]

Also make sure you dont have any flash drives, USB drives, portable drives plugged into it when you are booting up. Also, remove any CD's in the drive and try booting back up again.

[Keith]

Also make sure you dont have any flash drives, USB drives, portable drives plugged into it when you are booting up. Also, remove any CD's in the drive and try booting back up again.

I have already checked those things, but thanks for the reminder.
Keith

[Keith]

When this computer was brand new, I ordered 2) 500GB hard drives. They came and and I installed them after I had owned the computer for about 3 week. I found the original HD and reinstalled it. It still has Windows XP on it, so it was plug and play. All I had to do is update the virus definitions and update Windows.
I was thinking about plugging in the bad hard drive as a second hard drive tomorrow and see if I can access any of the files. If so, I'll try saving them to this hard drive. What are the chances of that working? Is there a program to do this?
Then I would like to set up a RAID array and duplicate everything on both hard drives. Will that offer protection this from happening in the future, or is that a waste? I seriously doubt I will ever fill one 500GB hard drive, let alone two of them, so I should have plenty of space. If this is not a good way to go, what would you suggest?

[Eagles1181]

Yes, you can set the second drive as a slave and copy over. There are programs, but honestly since this is a one time thing, they are going to take longer to set up, than they will save you. Just drag and drop your files to a folder on the new hard drive.

Yes, if you set up a mirrored RAID, it would protect against a hard drive crash, since it actually stores exact copies of everything on both hard drives. It will not however, protect against accidently deleting a file.

Eagle

[47]

When this computer was brand new, I ordered 2) 500GB hard drives. They came and and I installed them after I had owned the computer for about 3 week. I found the original HD and reinstalled it. It still has Windows XP on it, so it was plug and play. All I had to do is update the virus definitions and update Windows.
I was thinking about plugging in the bad hard drive as a second hard drive tomorrow and see if I can access any of the files. If so, I'll try saving them to this hard drive. What are the chances of that working? Is there a program to do this?
Then I would like to set up a RAID array and duplicate everything on both hard drives. Will that offer protection this from happening in the future, or is that a waste? I seriously doubt I will ever fill one 500GB hard drive, let alone two of them, so I should have plenty of space. If this is not a good way to go, what would you suggest?

Typically what will cause a drive to suddenly fail is head crash, when the actuator arm holding the read/write heads actually make contact with the drive platter, or from the arm not returning to the park position, can occur from get jarred, or even from sudden power failure while the drive is spinning and reading or writing data.

Sometimes heat can cause it.

There is an old trick, that I have successfully tried 3 or 4 times, sounds crazy but here goes...

Take the bad hard drive and place it in a couple zip lock bags, press out as much air as possible. place them in a freezer for a couple days.

On the day you plan to remove them, you'll want to have a working computer, case open, cables you intend to use identified connected...everything ready to go.

The theory behind this, in the event of a head crash or stuck out of the park position, freezing can maybe 1 time out of 10, cause the very thin metal parts a hard drive consist of to shrink just enough to allow them to function one last time, with luck, enough time to allow you to recover some data from them.

I read about this years ago when our business managers computer failed... it was a last ditch chance and there was nothing to lose, so I tried it.

And surprisingly, it worked like a charm. I have since tried the same method a dozen or more times, with success 3 more times.

It's certainly worth a shot.




I did a quick Google and found a couple other articles on this.

This one sounds good too, very similar to the method I have used.

http://www.datarecoverypros.com/hard-drive-recovery-freeze.html

[sfcbaker]

buy a MAC! LOL JK