Power outage problems..

Respital

Respital

Active Member
Alright well tonight we have been experiencing quite a few power surges and some outages. Unfortunately it seems to have affected my pc, despite a surge protector and household safeguards. After the first two surges i left my pc off but still plugged in..after about 40 minutes of waiting and 4 surges with about 5 flickerings i went to turn on the pc. Alk is good until i get to the windows loading screen which freezes and flashes a bsod. I was only able to catch it on video and it's standard except it only loads 1/3 of the text before restarting and not mentionig an error code.

I tried numerous times to no avail so i decided to check if my old pc still works which thankfully it does. My game plan is to purchase a 3tb drivr tomorrow and hopefull copy all of my data onto it. Then i will check for bad sectors using hdtune or whatever. All this on my old pc. I have left both computers completely unplugged for the night to avoid anymore damage. Hopefully the cmos batteries cant run out that quick..

So CF i'm looking for advice and help. I really do not want to lose my data.
 
The cmos batteries don't lose power just because the pc's are unplugged, they can last for years.

Usually when you have power outages, it only causes errors on the hard drive. Running the drive makers disk diagnostic program will usually fix the drive right up. Power surges on the other hand, will most likely damage parts...psu, memory, hdd's, cdroms, motherboards. basically anything. So test the hdd and run memtest.
 
johnb35 said:
The cmos batteries don't lose power just because the pc's are unplugged, they can last for years.

Usually when you have power outages, it only causes errors on the hard drive. Running the drive makers disk diagnostic program will usually fix the drive right up. Power surges on the other hand, will most likely damage parts...psu, memory, hdd's, cdroms, motherboards. basically anything. So test the hdd and run memtest.
Click to expand...

Ah i see. So what your saying is i should run WD's diagnostic lifeguard tools on the drive. Since i can't boot from the bad drive i'll have to put it in my other computer right?
 
No, you don't have to put it in a different computer. Download the the cd dos version of the software and create a bootable cd. You will be downloading an ISO file. Then use burning software capable of writing iso images to a cd then boot to the cd on your computer and run the long extended test.
 
johnb35 said:
No, you don't have to put it in a different computer. Download the the cd dos version of the software and create a bootable cd. You will be downloading an ISO file. Then use burning software capable of writing iso images to a cd then boot to the cd on your computer and run the long extended test.
Click to expand...

Alright i'm running the test now. Any idea how long it should take on a 500GB black drive?

Edit: it completed the quick tesr (as part of the extended test) in 4m 16s without any errors. The full media test is running now.
 
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Well this is strange indeed...both full and quick scans reveal no errors to be found. Error/status code : 0000. Now i have no clue why it doesnt work.... :s
 
I have used SpinRite6 several times and every HDD I used it on it recovered.
I have a drive that was a storage drive that would lock my computer right up when I would try to access it, fixed and still working.

I have a drive that is in a spare comp that would just keep rebooting and WD tools wouldn't fix it. I could have just reinstalled the OS but I ran SpinRite on it and it booted fine. Eventually I did a reinstall anyway.

I have used it a few other times to help bring back friends drives.

I always backed up what I didn't have backed up after getting the drives going but none of the drives failed afterward, at least not that I am aware of.

Edit: Reinstalling your OS is quicker and puts less wear on your drive.
 
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Alright well my head is about to explode...here's why..

I realize that I have an old 250GB hard drive in my computer so i hook that up and try to boot from it, and it works. Except the mouse doesn't want to cooperate, i tried replugging it etc and so i restart the computer. After restarting my computer it magically boots into my 500gb drive without me adjusting any settings for it to do so and is as of right now, working. I can't think of any explanation for this. And am wondering if i should still go and get a 3tb drive to back up my stuff (even though I already have a 1TB but it's full of other stuff too).

Looks like i won't have to use spinrite for now..
 
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