On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 00:29:37 -0600, Ronn!Blankenship <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: : > the night this happened. So, you experts out there, any ideas on how to > completely repair the problem(s), or at least recover the data?
My sympathies. I've just had my computer crap out on me, (including a broken HD), as well, so I know the pain and inconvience...
My sympathies in return.
FWIW, here's a list of the drives I have and their status:
drive #1 � The new 80GB drive which came in the new machine (Dell Dimension 3000) is reported as "Unknown Device" whether it is installed as Drive 0/primary/master or Drive 1/secondary/slave. In the first instance (new drive as primary) the machine will not boot up: it reports "Drive 0 not found".
drive #2 � The old (approx. 4 years old when that machine failed) 11GB drive which was the primary from the Win 98SE machine: same as above in both positions.
drive #3 � The old (approx. 3.5 years old when that machine failed) 80GB drive which was the secondary from the Win 98SE machine:
same as above in both positions.
drive #4 � The old (1996, iirc) 1.6GB drive which was the primary from the really old (1995) Win 95 machine: installed as Drive 0/primary/master, it attempts to boot Win 95 (though as I mentioned previously, that installation had developed a registry problem, so it does not finish, but it gets about as far in the new machine as I think it was getting in the old one when that one died).
drive #5 � The old (1997 or early 98?) 4.3GB drive which was the secondary from the really old (1995) Win 95 machine: with nothing else available atm, I reformatted it and installed Win XP (the OS and the drivers I installed from the "Driver and Utilities" CD � perhaps not all of them, but the ones I found I needed � took up about half of that drive or a bit more), and that is what I am running on now (just over 1 MB free now that I have replaced a few basic applications such as Eudora . . . ). With Win XP installed on the 4.3GB drive and it jumpered and installed as Drive 0/primary/master, I can read files from the 1.6GB drive with no problems and copy them to the 4.3GB drive (although obviously not too many of them). BTW, this (the 4.3GB drive) is the so-called "Quantum Bigfoot" drive, which as I mentioned earlier is as wide and long as or longer than a typical internal CD or DVD drive, so it is basically propped up to run because there is no place inside the case for it . . .
Steve's suggestions are good: check the jumpers
I did not look at the jumpers on the new drive (#1) as they were set at the factory before attempting to copy from the other drives, but when I got it out, there was no jumper in the "master" position but there was a jumper installed next to it in the position labeled "CS" ("cable select"?) Assuming that this is what led to the problem � "cable select" didn't work properly even though the drives were installed on the proper connectors on the cable � any words of advice on what to look for to determine that that is indeed what happened or how to repair the problem and get the drives working again (preferably w/o losing any data)?
and just try one drive at a time to eliminate the power supply as a potential issue.
Done that.
Also check to make sure your IDE cable is well seated at both ends. And check the power connector connection on the drives as well - those %^&*$% molex 4-pin power connectors are the worst.
Tried three different IDE cables. All have the same result (the same drives � #4 & #5 � work with all three; the same drives � #1, #2, & #3 � don't work with all three). I've played with the connections and cannot seat the connectors any better without using a hammer to pound them in . . . :)
Other thoughts: - What is saying the drive is an unknown device? The BIOS, or Windows when you boot with the working disk?
BIOS
- Most PC BIOS's allow you to go in and fiddle a bit with the IDE device detection, I know one of my old PC's BIOS had an option to autodetect the hard disk. It's worth trying to fiddle around in the BIOS if you haven't already tried.
Tried that. Some things I tried wrt autodetect stopped it from detecting anything at all. Nothing I've tried yet has gotten it to recognize any of the three disks which it reports as "Unknown device". Any suggestions of combinations of settings to try which I might not have tried yet would be welcomed.
- Given that you've got 3 previously working drives all not responding at the same time, it makes me think it's a configuration/cabling/jumper problem rather than actual drive failures.
If it is, I haven't found it yet, hence the cry for help :)
Is there any way for you to try the drives on a different computer?
Not unless I _buy_ another [working] computer . . .
- On my brand new PC (replacing the crapped out one), it wouldn't properly detect either of my (new/working) hard disks until I disabled the RAID option in the BIOS - does your PC support RAID, could the option for it have been accidentally activated somehow?
I don't recall right off. (As I think I said earlier, I had had this one up less than a week before the problem occurred.) I'll check that. I don't remember seeing it: what would you guess I should look under in the BIOS?
Also, as I said, the new HD (#1) which came with the new machine [apparently] worked perfectly for several days until I tried to copy files off the old one (#2). I had already successfully connected and copied files from the 1.6 GB drive (#4).
- It's not likely to be a fix for you, but I'll mention it any, because I wish I had heard it earlier than I did. Sometimes disks die because of "stiction" as it's called, where the just disk won't spin up one day. That's happened to me a few times in the past, and it's catastrophic because there's no warning.
As I mention below, the machine with drives #2 and #3 was apparently dying slowly for at least a few weeks prior to the very end, as evidenced by an increasing number of various errors which were usually corrected by rebooting), but I had not been able to isolate the problem, nor had someone with more experience.
Over at the Anandtech forums, I've seen a number of people swear that they've revived a dead disk by popping it in the freezer for a few hours, then immediately plugging it in, and it would spin up and work long enough to retrieve the data off it. I haven't tried it, but if the disk is dead anyway and you've lost valuable data, it might be worth a shot. - There is software that can pull lost data files and directories off even a reformatted disk (est $100),
I have Norton and I've used it to do that in the past. I also have some other utilities which I have never had an opportunity to try which are supposed to do something similar.
(Of course, there is the problem that such utilities often leave one with a pile of files named something like "nnnnnn.RCV" which then one has to guess what format they were in and then try to recognize them � "Okay, if I change the extension to .JPG . . . ah, it looks like a picture of the surface of Titan! Or maybe Mars. Or maybe someone's desert vacation which they e-mailed me. Or . . . " � and with literally tens of thousands of such files on the old 80 GB drive . . . )
but if your computer won't recognize the drive at all, that won't help you.
That indeed appears to be the problem.
- If you're really desperate to get your data and all else fails, there are data recovery services that can very likely help. I've seen some as cheap as $200-500, but prices can go much, much higher.
Yep. I know someone locally from the church who does that.
- Advice from someone who's been burned by lost data many different ways: Paranoia is good. Invest in a DVD recorder
Ahem.
My plan for several months before the old machine died was to add a DVD burner and (preferably)/or (depending on availability of money) an external hard drive to it (the latter so I could put _all_ of the stuff I might use in teaching on it and so could carry it back and forth to class with me rather than copying just the stuff which I need for the night onto the 256MB travel drive to carry with me, and having to keep copies of a lot of stuff on every computer I might use in the classroom). Unfortunately, some money I have been expecting for awhile was slow in coming (a long story involving lawyers that no one wants to hear recounted), so that did not happen before the old machine started acting up and slowly at first and then at an accelerated rate died. When no one had any ideas of how to get it working (another guy from the church who does work of that sort looked at it, and when I got it back it worked for a total of about 4 hours before dying forever), someone took pity on me and sent me this new Dell Dimension 3000 for Christmas, and then with some money various family members sent for Christmas I ordered a DVD drive (Sony model DRU-710A, which supports �R, �RW, and double-layer formats: it was a toss-up between that and Memorex model with pretty much identical features, but I found the Sony drive cheaper. During some on-line research I did before ordering, I found that Pioneer also makes a very similar model, and it had some nice reviews, but a downside � for me, at least � was that the Sony and Memorex drives come with Nero software while the Pioneer drive has some other brand, and in the past with CD-RW drives I've had better experiences with Nero than other software in that Nero would work while others didn't . . . ). The first thing I planned was to copy all the files from the old HD onto DVDs, but of course by the time it arrived the computer had quit working . . . :(
--Ronn! :)
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