Hard Drive Issues

[Allen kccard]

My grandma called me because overnight the computer I built for her a couple years ago went from working fine to booting to an "insert system disk" error.

When I got there, I noticed right off that the cooling fan in front of the hard drive had siezed up, but was hoping that it wouldn't have been an over heating issue as this was not a system that would ever have much of a load on it to build up heat, the entire intention of the build was to get her something that would last her for a long time wihtout going obsolete.

When the hard drive is powered, I can hear what sounds like the reader arms moving and a whirring of the disks, so it sounds as if it is at least funtional, but I was getting the insert system disk as well.

I started out using a DOS boot disk, but everything I tried with that wouldn't recoginze the hard drive being there.

Next I attached the bad hard drive to a working system with CS jumpers for both and the slave on bad one, but with this all I get is a message that there is no master found. Thinking I had messed up on the cables, I switched them to have the master on the bad one, but then a boot came back with the insert system disk message.


My next thoughts were to get an external hard drive enclosure and try to see if I could get things going with this, but since I've been striking out so far I thought I'd run it by the smart folks here to see what options could be out there.


What could be wrong, and why would whatever is wrong cause even the master hard drive not to be able to boot? Better yet, what are some ideas to try and fix it so I can recover the data?


Thanks in advance to anyone that has any suggestions!

Allen

 

[Dahak]

Originally posted by: Allen kccard


Next I attached the bad hard drive to a working system with CS jumpers for both and the slave on bad one, but with this all I get is a message that there is no master found. Thinking I had messed up on the cables, I switched them to have the master on the bad one, but then a boot came back with the insert system disk message.


Allen

You where heading in the right direction for this, but you should have the bad one as slave and the good one as master, or in the bios to tell it to boot to the good one.
thats the reason why you are getting the missing boot disk again as you where trying to boot from the bad one again.

one that is done you should be able to backup any data off it

Once that is don't you can put the bad disk back into the machine and boot off the xp install cd and select the Recovery Console
then try running chkdsk /r /p
also what you an try is fixboot and fixmbr as well as they re-write the boot data, but only try these after the chkdsk

 

[Allen kccard]

Well, I actually did try it that way first, I only switched it because I was confused by the boot messages told me because it was ignoring the fact that I had a good hard drive as master and failed to boot saying that there was no master hard drive, so I purposely did it backwards to see what it did and then got the ensert system disk message again.

 

[Allen kccard]

After working some more on it, I found in the BIOS that I still had it set to connect with a secondary master hard drive, which is why I was seeing messages that there was no master hard disk even when I had the bad hard drive connected in the slave position.

I changed it to stop any secondary masters and got a little further. Now it a let me get to a point where POST completes and XP starts to load, but I am stuck again when the windows load locks up when the bad hard drive is connected anywhere. I tried starting up into safe mode and it locks up there as well.

I also tried disconnecting the cd rom and connecting the bad hard disk with these IDE slots, and the same windows locking up problem happened this way as well.

 

[duragezic]

Maybe I missed something, but you just need the hard drive plugged in so you can copy data from it? You shouldn't be trying to boot from it... assuming you have your own computer with a XP install on it, just plug in your grandma's drive as slave or whatever really, as long as you select in the BIOS to boot from your own, working drive. I'm doing the same thing right now for my roommate. His external 320gb started to hose and all of his data disappeared, so I pulled the drive out to plug into mine, and trying to recover data from it that way. The fact that the drive still seems to work is good... I wouldn't try booting from it though. You want any time that it is working to be time that you are copying the data you need from it to your own drive, then setup your grandma with a new hard drive with windows and copy her saved data to that.

 

[Allen kccard]

I haven't been explaining some of it very well, sorry for the confusion.

Yes, I need to just do something, anything, to get the hard drive connected to get data off of it.

At first, I was getting errors as if I were trying to boot from the 2nd hard drive, although it should have been connected as a slave. I found my mistake in the fact that in BIOS it was setup to have a primary master and secondary master, so I assume that with both of them on Cable Select it treated them both as masters.

I disabled this in BIOS and that got me further. Now I am getting past POST and getting to the Windows XP load screen. The green progress bar does its thing and then freezes. This has happened several ways, like the way I described above with both of them on the same IDE, and also when I plugged the IDE that was going to my CD ROM into the second hard drive instead.


So the crux of the problem at this point is that if I have the bad hard drive setup as a Slave it is somehow preventing Windows to load...Safe Modes, Last Known Good, or normal Windows Startup.

 

[moonsite]

Having the Secondary channel enabled is not really the problem. You should change the jumper from CS to Master and Slave. Have the good drive on Master and the bad drive on slave. If you are getting a lock up, try booting into Safe Mode and disable any checkdisk on bootup. I guess the last resort is putting it in an external enclosure. I would attempt to do fdisk /mbr as well if you haven't already done so. This has to be done on the bad hard drive plug in as Master and good drive unplugged (just to be safe) so you won't mess up the mbr on the good drive.

 

[Allen kccard]

I'm not sure if I was quoting the error right on my previous posts.

If I have the bad drive connected as a slave I get an error of "Primary Slave Hard Disk Failure."

In BIOS it can detect the hard drive there so I don't think it is the controller (and it works with my working hard drive anyway), but on POST it gives the error of the Disk Failure.

I booted from floppy to DOS and when I get in there when I try to run fdisk /mbr I get a message of "No fixed disks present."