Need recovery advice

I

idyllhands

New Member
Hi, I just moved my pc from home to where I'm staying for a month for a job, and booted it a few times here fine. But today I booted it up and it told me the cmos settings had been lost. I entered cmos and the clock was set back to 2004 and all, and also, now one of my SATA II HDD isnt being recognized. I don't have another pc here to stick it in to test, but I tried out the other SATA ports and still no luck. I just bought the HDD about 5-6 months ago, so I think maybe my mobo is going out? but I don't understand why it recognizes one of my SATA II drives, but not the boot drive...any ideas here would be greatly appreciated, I have all of my documents, code, etc. from the last 5 years on that drive =( Would a power surge be able to fry a HDD but not the mobo??

Thanks guys.

ps- I borrowed a laptop too, which is what i'm on now...and it is fine, and was plugged to the same outlet.
 
Have you tried a fresh battery on the board? After 5yrs. time you have to expect the battery on the board itself will have let go.
 
PC eye said:
Have you tried a fresh battery on the board? After 5yrs. time you have to expect the battery on the board itself will have let go.
Click to expand...

No, I haven't. Do they generally take standard batteries, or would I need to special order one?

Also, more importantly, do you think that a dead battery would lead to trouble with my SATA drive too? Or is it just coincidence that the events both happened at once? I think what I will do is order a USB-to-SATA device (which I wanted to buy anyway) and try my drive in that. Hopefully I can at least nab all my documents and stuff off the HDD before it goes to sleep forever.

So, now another question =)
Any advice on purchasing a USB-to-SATA device? My drive is SATA II, so would I need to look for one that specifically says it is for SATA II? I've seen some that just say "SATA," does this indicate it's just SATA I? I hope you know what I mean when I say USB-to-SATA device..I'm not sure if that is what they are technically called.
 
Respital said:
Maybe try a different sata cable and see if it works :) thats all i can think of..
Click to expand...

Good call. My only concern is that frequently booting my PC will damage my drive further. I think once I get this resolved I will RAID my drives from now on lol. I'm thinking maybe the reader motor just went out, and am thinking of trying the "freezer trick" next, but want to wait til I get home so I can actually back my stuff up if it works :)

And if anyone has advice on the USB-to-SATA thing, I still would love to hear about it...
 
First off on a system that old expect the battery to be just about gone. I've seen the small coin sized lithium batteries go on boards in a little over a year's time. Most now use the 2032 numbered battery typical for calculators, digital watches, etc. and found in the battery racks of most retail dept. stores as well as Radio Shack.

The one on the board there may be a different number where cross referencing it by bringing it along with you will help. They run about $2-$3 a piece.

The boot drive itself could have simply quit on you there. If the board went you wouldn't see other drives working while that was the only one seeing problems. As for external drives you can see those in usb, usb/firewire, usb/eSata, and usb/firewire/eSata types. You can even find 2terabyte sized drives for the high price at this time.

Here I won't see RAID while running two identical 500gb sata models. If one drive sees a glitch or fails you tend to lose a lot more. Sata cables are generally far better and more durable then your typical flat ribbon type ide cable. But it never hurts having a few extras kicking around just in case.
 
Yeh, I think the drive is just gone =(
Assuming I can get it running again, is it possible to restore my files onto a new HDD using a backup file from my old one? I'm running XP 64 bit if that is applicable, and I did back it up shortly before I left.
 
Once you see a clean install on a new drive you give it a try as long as the drive can still be read from and the backup is still intact. There's no way to guaranty results there however.

Here I simply created a number of storage folders copied to an external drive when planning to remove an ide host in order to run strictly a pair of identical sata drives for still running XP on one with Vista on the other. I could have easily turned those into a storage array with only Vista remaining on the ide model.

In regards to Sata I+II drives the Sata I type sees the standard molex type power connector as well as the sata type power connection and a jumper. The purpose for the jumper there is a little different then for ide drives since that changes drive mode while ide drives use it for the position on the cable.
 
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