Computer Troubleshooting

[PilotMan]

This shouldn't be too difficult, but it is killing me that it happend in the first place. My desktop went from working fine in the morning and being off all day to not booting up at all.

The MB and processor are about 18 months old, and the HD is about 15 months.

It starts normally with the graphics card being read, then jumps to the MB splash screen where the CD, DVD and 3.5 are accessed, then it goes to the HD, makes a click-click, click-click and everything comes to a screeching halt. The screen never gets to the BIOS and I can't seem to interrupt the process at any point.

I have tried to boot to a drive but that is unsuccessful as well. I have an idea that perhaps it is the boot sector on the HD, or perhaps the whole things collapsed, but why can I not boot to another drive? Is the MB involved here somewhere? Or is there something else that I am missing?

[SirFozzie]

Complete guess, but it sounds good..

check your HD Controller..

[PackerFanatic]

Yeah, check all of your connections (especially the one from the HDD to the mobo) If you cannot get into BIOS, how did you change the boot drive?

[PilotMan]

Didn't change the boot drive, I always have mine set to read the others first before the HD.

[PackerFanatic]

Ah gotcha, I get it now, heh.

Normally (although I am sure its different on ALL mobos) the BIOS is the very first thing you would be able to get to, before any accessed of drives. I assume you tried just hitting some buttons on boot (F2, F8, and F12 would be good ones to try) just to see if you could get into BIOS. To me, it doesn't sound like it would be a BIOS problem, but if you can't get into BIOS, that could be indication of a bigger problem.

[PilotMan]

I just ran it up again, and I certainly cannot access the BIOS in any way. I was thinking that the drives were being accessed in their normal startup but that may not be the case.

The ROM's power up first, then the DVD is accessed for what reason I am not sure, the 3.5 is not accessed and then it hangs in the fashion I described earlier.

Personally, I would rather it be a MB problem then a HD problem, because changing a MB is easier than recovering 100gigs of lost information.

[PackerFanatic]

Is there another machine you could use to access the HDD to make sure that is not the case?

[thetrilogy]

If you can disconnect your HD, do that. Then see if you can get into the BIOS.
A noise from the hard drive may spell disaster. A memory problem would usually not allow you to get any video on the screen.

So pull your HD cables off and start the machine specifically to attempt to get to the BIOS. Consider a dead battery on the BIOS too. But troubleshoot in steps.

[PilotMan]

Well, I was able to pull the HD out of my son's computer, and get it to boot on mine. I got his computer to recognize mine as a slave, but the BIOS is so old it couldn't grasp the size of the disk. So when I tried to access it on his system Windows wouldn't show me that the drive existed. Generally to me, that is a bad sign, but since the BIOS couldn't match the specs it may not work anyway. His isn't fast enough to run WinXP so I couldn't try it as the master there either.

What I did find is that the BIOS on my system will read and recognize both drives, however, I can't get a clean boot on my son's drive on my computer to be able to tell if mine will work as a slave anywhere. :(

It seems that I have narrowed it down to a HD problem, but cannot determine if it is just a boot problem or a complete collapse. FWIW, the drive does seem to spin normally without making any strange noises.

[thetrilogy]

Can you get into Safe Mode from XP with the hard drive connected?

[PilotMan]

Can you get into Safe Mode from XP with the hard drive connected?

Nope, not at all. This HD should still be under warranty so after I get a new HD and straighten it all out, there may be a little reimbursement for me.

I am getting a new 300GB 133ATA Maxtor drive from newegg. It should be here next week. I only hope that the other drive isn't a total loss.

[PilotMan]

Alright, here is an update.

I got the new HD installed and Windows loaded onto it. I used a couple of diagnostic programs on the old HD and they show that my old HD is now a 32GB HD that is FAT16 partitioned with no boot info on it at all. But that this area just needs formatting and all will be well with it.

Considerinig that it should be 160GB with about 5 partitions, all NTFS, I am thinking that this is a problem.

Does anyone have a good next step? The drive still is under warranty, but it contains loads of information that I need off of it.

Is this what a complete HD failure looks like? I have yet to experience that so I don't know what it looks like. Funny thing is that the old HD makes no wierd noises and spins up normally. It passed all basic scan checks in it's new state.

What happened here? The computer shut down normally, and was off all day. I go to start it up and it is just blown.

Just frustrating.:mad:

[Franklinnoble]

Sounds like your partitions got whacked... I think this is kept in the MBR, but I'm not sure. It may be possible to recover the data with some more advanced disk recovery utilities, but I'm not intimately acquainted with any of them.

[Daimyo]

Assuming it isn't actually physically broken you should be able to recover the data from the hard drive but it will either cost you a lot of money or take a lot of time and relatively high level of technical skill.

In decreasing order of cost, increasing order of work/skill required:

There are services that you can send the drive to that will recover data and send it back to you on either a new hard disk or on multiple DVDs, but it is VERY expensive.

There are utilities that run probably ~$300 (I haven't used such a commercial product in 4 years or so) that can pull the files off and come with nice user friendly GUIs. Unfortunately it will probably not be able to get the file names so you'll be left with a lot of files to go through to find out what is what.

If you want something free you can download the Helix forensics live CD. It is not nearly as easy to use (unless you have decent linux experience), but I believe there is a tool on there that can extract files from a damaged or formatted hard disk.

[yabanci]

It sounds like the first sector of your master boot record got damaged somehow. When this happens, Windows is unable to execute the first piece of code in the MBR and the computer just stalls on boot, no error messages or anything. If this is the case, the data should still be there, you just need to fix the MBR so Windows can boot and read it. On the other hand, it might be your partition table that is damaged, which might explain why a 160gb nfts drive showed up as 32gb fat.

If I were you, first I would clone the drive so that if anything goes wrong in your repair attempt, you still have whatever data is there so that you can try other recovery methods. The best way to do this is with Acronis True Image 9 Home, which you should have anyway so you can make image backups in the future. Whatever you do, don't try to save anything on the damaged drive.

Then take your new drive out of the computer and make your old drive the master again. Insert the Windows CD and boot to the CD. You'll get a prompt to press "R" to enter the recovery console. Select whatever option it will give you to repair your windows installation. Type in "FIXMBR" at the prompt. After that, you should able to boot normally. If that doesn't work, you might need to fix the boot sector in addition to the MBR. Reboot with the windows CD, go to the recovery console again, and this time type "FIXBOOT". Hopefully that will solve the problem.

If that doesn't work, you'll probably need to look to third party recovery tools such as Active@Partition Recovery (http://www.partition-recovery.com/partition.htm) or Active@Uneraser (http://www.uneraser.com/). You can use the demos to see if recovery is possible, but you'll have to buy a license to actually do the recovery.

Good luck. Wouldn't want to be you. Don't forget to make backups in the future :)

[PilotMan]

That is good info guys. FWIW, in some of the utils that I have run on it I am seeing an error at sector 0 on the troubled disk.

In addition it looks like the 32GB is coming from the first two partitions of the HD being largely intact. Those were the Windows XP dedicated drive and the applications partition that I made for any other program that wasn't a game or windows related. Can't seen anything that was game related, however I was able to see previews for some of the 1200 or so photos, but that partition seems to be AWOL at the moment.