MAJOR hard drive failure, please help ='(

y2keable

Member
yesterday my computer crashed all of a sudden, when i switched it back on the monitor displayed this after the POST:

searching for boot record from floppy:..not found (normal)
searching for boot record from CD-ROM:...not found
(normal)
searching for boot record from IDE-0...OK
(normal)

invalid system disk
(ok, now i'm worried)
insert correct disk in the drive and press any key to continue


i'm guessing my hard drive has suffered a catastrophic failure. its my boot drive, everything[/] is on that drive and i'm in the sh!t without my computer. i'm only able to use it now because i have a small, 5 year old IBM lappy hard drive that i've been able to stick in and install windows on. i also have the failed hard drive in one of my raid card ports so i can try to read it. the drive has 2 partitions, one of them works but the main partition (with the OS on) gives the message "drive F is not formatted. format now? y/n" when i try to open it.

strangely, when i start the computer in DOS, i can access the files on the hard drive and brows through the all the directories with no trouble. i've even been able to retreive most of the data using "xcopy" in MS-DOS but its really time consuming. when xcopy comes to copy most of the files, i reterns a message "file path not found". does this mean the file that its trying to copy is damaged? is there any way to get all the files back that i want or is the hard drive compleatly cabbaged??

thanks for any help
Jayson

P.S. since i don't have a spell checker at the moment, i'll leave it up to one of you to tell me how many mistakes i make =)
 

PC eye

banned
If the battery was gone you wouldn't be able to set up and install Windows on the older drive. The first thing that would be seen when first powering on the system would be the first bios setup screen for time and date settings. It sounds more like a damaged "MBR"(master boot record) or loss of partition information. With a boot floppy if you are running 98 or ME you would type in "fdisk /mbr" at the dos prompt and press enter.
 

y2keable

Member
i'm using (and was using) Win XP but i have the CD for Win 98 to boot with and use a propper DOS version, rather than XP's stupid equivalent which dosen't have things like Fdisk and Xcopy. (i've been using xcopy to save a few files)

i got nothing out of the ordinary when i rebooted my computer except for what i mentioned, nothing to do with the BIOS setup kicking in. however, i went into the settings there was nothing wrong there too, it still "sees" the hard drive.

Fdisk won't give me any problems iether, everything seems normal in Fdisk. i've never come across MBR before. if its missing, is it possible that i could put it back?

cheers
Jayson
 

PC eye

banned
The master boot record sits in the some 100mb at the very beginning of the drive. The "fdisk /mbr" command repairs any changes to the boot record. You must have installed XP on a Fat32 partition for you to be able to even access anything on the drive there. You will need a 98 boot floppy to boot from and run the command at the dos prompt.

If you don't have an old startup floppy you make up a new one by downloading what you need from http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm
 

y2keable

Member
thanks for that. i have a 98 boot flopy, i even have a genuine CD =)

i'll try the fdisk /mbr thingy

...and yes it is an FAT32 partition/windows xp combo, strange though it may seem =)
 

PC eye

banned
XP will go on a Fat32 as well as an NTFS type partition. But to see the best results for dual booting an XP/98 combination install 98 first on the number #1 primary and XP on the second extended. The boot loader will see the choice between either loading XP by default or choosing 98. The fdisk /mbr command also works on XP stand alone systems. Plus NTFS is a faster more stable platform then Fat32.

To access a second XP installation if you decide on a dual boot while on the Fat primary in dos you can use the NTFS4Dos utility. XP will easily read and write to any previous version's partition. You can download the freeware version at http://www.freewarefiles.com/program_9_90_11100.html
 

PC eye

banned
Have you tried the fdisk mbr command? If that doesn't see results you would have to perform a repair install for the XP installation. That will get repair and replace the main system files without wiping out the current installations of softwares and the folders. You will need the XP cd for this one detailed in the article seen at http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Ready for Knoppix Live for cd? With a live distro like Knoppix you can copy files from one hard drive to another when one becomes inaccessible. For the general description on the live Linux distro, http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

The long list of download sites is found at http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html
 
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