Back up your HDD

Stating the bleedin obvious here, but you should never back up less data than you're prepared to lose. If that means backing up daily (or even twice daily) then that's what you gotta do. You didn't buy thr HDD from PC World did you? If you did, you might as well be juggling meat cleavers!

You could boot off the OS CD and see whether the disk is recoverable. W2K and XP have 'recovery consoles' that allow you to write the MBR and boot sector. Or put the disk in another PC and see whether the file system(s) will mount. It depends what has failed.

If you're really serious then there are people who can recover your data. If that means removing the platters from your drive and putting them into another chassis, then that is what would be done. Expensive of course.

Paul

Steve,

I've got two hdd's in my computer. One mirrors everything the other does, so in the event of a drive failure, I have another back-up.

Why don't you buy a second hdd. They only cost £70.

Count.d

If the problem is caused by a virus, is it not possible that it could crash both drives?

Paul

I've been considering upgrading to XP for a while (currently using W98SE). Now might be a good time to do it. What is MBR?

HTK

Yes it is obvious isn't it. But I bet I'm not the only one who forgets until it's too late.


Steve B

Steve,

It's been a while since I played with 98SE,but...

MBR is the Master Boot record

To try and fix the MBR if you can't boot up as normal,you will neet to have a bootable floppy disk to hand.

(If you have not got one,pop round to someone with a 98se based pc,pop a formatted floppy in the a: drive & from a DOS prompt,type "sys a:"
This will then make a bootable floppy.
At this point it might not be a bad idea to stick the "fdisk.exe" file on the same floppy. You should find this in the c:\windows\system or system32 folder ( can't remember which)

Then return to you own pc & reboot with the floppy in. This should boot up to a DOS prompt ( a:\> ) See if you can see any of the contents of your C: drive by using "DIR C:" If you can,you may have half a chance.

If you can,then type "c:" This will put you at root of the hard-drive. then type "FDISK /MBR"

(If it comes up as bad command or file not found type message,you may have to type in "cd windows\system" (or system32) depending where you found the fdisk.exe on the other pc).Then enter the "fdisk /mbr" command

Fdisk has a normally undocumented parameter called /MBR that causes it to write the master boot record to the hard disk).

(Memory very hazy on this last bit)
If all the above fails. Then reboot the pc,again,with the bootable floppy,and at the "a:\> " prompt, type "sys c:" This should attempt to write a bootable system to the c: drive.

After this,reboot as normal.

It may or may not work. Your hard-drive may well be duff .

HTH

Chris

I would chime in with an 'buy apple' slogan but tonight I had a scare.

I left the computer to watch the simpson when I noticed a noise. It sounded like the harddrive was caught in a cycle, but it was a slight high pitched noise followed by a click, the computer had froze and I shit myself.

I restarted and it would not. LUckily I was able to recover it by holding down ALT on start (which searches the drive for bootable volumes)

God knows what went wrong and all is fine now, but yes I would agree back up is going to be high on my list.

The good news is my ipod mounts as a harddrive so I can back up all I like to this very easily, which I will be doing in the short term.

One more point to note, wireless keyboards and mice are great fun, but when you nered to use buttons on startup it becomes a big problem!

Gary if you've read any of the Panther firewire horror stories you would refrain from the Mac chant. Panther though awesome!!!

Snigger, yes I did read about them! Got out of stum though, thats the main thing!

Hi

In this day and age of the computer with so much reliance upon it and the current relative low cost of HDD, I would venture some form of raid would be an appropriate method of safe guarding data the quality of modern HDD now not what they once were.

Regards

Stuart

Chris, thanks.

I tried most of your suggestions and all I get is "Invalid Drive Specification".

Also, although the BIOS detects the drive type, it now takes a long time (several minutes) to think about it before the floppy boots up.

Sigh, I need some music.

Steve B

I have a Lacie Pocket Drive which I plug into my PC before booting up each day. I use a program called HandyBackup, and it just backs up my whole drive in the background every hour. I unplug it and take it home at the end of the day, and can then access any files at home if I need to from another PC.
It is so easy these days that there really isn't any reason to lose work. I dump the drive to a DVD disc every month.
Total cost of Pocket drive & software about £160.
Smug

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Also, although the BIOS detects the drive type, it now takes a long time (several minutes) to think about it before the floppy boots up.

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Steve,

I have only ever come accross four similar problems to this.

1. The Hard drive had suffered a "head-crash" - it had to be replaced.

2.The IDE channel itself had gone west....I seem to remember that the mother-board had to be changed.

3. The BIOS had got corrupted - sorted out by re-flashing.(be REALLY careful if you attempt this)

4.The IDE cable attached from the Motherboard-Harddrive had developed a faulty connection,sorted by unplugging & reseating

If the unplugging & re-seating does not work,I would be inclined to pull out the hard drive,alter the jumpers at the back to use as a "secondary" device & temprorarily install it in another pc.

Best o' luck

Chris

Unbelievable! After smugly posting in here, what should happen to me this morning? Blue screen of death on boot up - never seen it in W2k before - HD error. Into the BIOS, make machine bootable from CD, run chkdsk, sorted. I take my hat off to W2k. this used to be a total disaster situation - I never managed to recover from one of these under 9x - although it's supposed to be possible.

And I hadn't done my weekly back up.....

Cheers

Harry

Weekly backups. Ah yes, what a great idea!

Rewrote 40 PowerPoint slides on Thursday and saved to hard disk. Hard disk died on Friday before weekly backup done. Spent the weekend resurrecting and updating the slides from last years training (work I had already done once on Thursday) but at least I had the chance to do that.

Moral of tale - if it's important then back it up as soon as you have saved it to at least one format if not two.

It's been a bad weekend but it could have been a damn sight worse. Sympathies to all here who have had these problems.

Those USB remembering sticks are a real boon. And getting cheaper. Most of my clients have in house PCs and projectors so if it's just a presentation I can often travel very light. Good for immediately backing up the really precious stuff too.

Harry

I replaced the broken WD HD with a Maxtor 60Gb 2 weeks ago. After hearing strange clicking noises during boot up for the last few days the inevitable happened yesterday.

Yes, that's another new hard drive failed. Are they really this unreliable, or have I been extremely unlucky?

Steve B

There are data recovery programs avilable (Encase is one)which require you to slave the problem drive to a larger capacity one. These progs will usually work even when the drive is not bootable and all else fails. The data is then recovered to the good drive.
You could probably download one of these progs to evaluate it from kazaa or emule or some such, my mates have had a good result most of the time with them.
Regards
Jim

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Originally posted by Chris Brandon:

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Also, although the BIOS detects the drive type, it now takes a long time (several minutes) to think about it before the floppy boots up.

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4.The IDE cable attached from the Motherboard-Harddrive had developed a faulty connection,sorted by unplugging & reseating

If the unplugging & re-seating does not work,I would be inclined to pull out the hard drive,alter the jumpers at the back to use as a "secondary" device & temprorarily install it in another pc.

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My PC's done this since I upgraded to XP (and put a new CDRW in). We couldn't get the HDD/CDRW to work together as master/slave for love nor money, so I just pulled both jumpers and now have to wait while the machine boots. Once the first POST is done it's OK for reboots.

Maxtor HDDs have been acknowledged to be crap for at least the last 7 years according to my mate (who's built >150 PCs in his spare time in the last decade). WD are usually pretty fine though. HDDs sure ARE not what they were though - I had access to a 1985 Honeywell XT until the year before last, and that had a 10 MEGABYTE (he he he he he he he!!!!) drive in it- it worked fine last time I used it. That drive was so old that you had to manually park the heads...

__________________________
Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.

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Maxtor HDDs have been acknowledged to be crap for at least the last 7 years according to my mate (who's built >150 PCs in his spare time in the last decade).

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Oh no!

Steve B

Steve B,

If the data is very important to you, you can take several routes:

1. Fix it yourself. If you are not an IT Pro or have an in depth knowledge of BIOS/HDD recovery and the appropriate tools-do not try!

2. Take it to the place or purchase (PC World?) and ask if they can quote on a recovery cost?

3. Locate a specialist recovery company on the NET in the UK and again ask for a quote!

I have suffered exactly the same problem as you with the same HDD, but luckily recovered it by using the W2K/Toolkit for a full recovery.

Then sold the bloody m/c a week later...cheap HDD's are really crap!

If the data is not, too important, then do not bother!

Take the PC to a nice quite spot, near a refuse tip and throw it as hard as possible at a brick wall-this makes you feel much better. Then buy one with a full maintainence agreement: Dell do a good deal?

I now run an Application/File Server with dual everything (processor, RAID5 HDD's, power supplies, battery UPS, 40 GB DAT, /DLT, fire safe...Running Windows Server and UNIX. A bit over the top-I know, but very, very fault resistant.

In addition, I backup one x Full System Backup and give it to my Bank for safe storage in a fire safe each month...just in case?

Hope it all works out...!

Thanks for the advise but the offending WD hard drive has already been returned for a refund. The replacement Maxtor failed after 2 weeks (it had been making clicking noises since install) and this has now been replaced by another Maxtor.

My original HD (before the WD) is sitting in the PC for regular back-up duties. (As well as using the CDRW for back-ups).

Steve B