Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
• Keep the drive on the same horizontal plane as you flick your wrist twisting the drive as you
would spin a top to make it spin. If the problem was stiction, the drive should now be spinning
and you on your way to retrieving the data. If the drive is just sitting there "clicking, clicking,
clicking,” good luck! Please remember the only 100 percent way to keep your data safe is
BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP. Use the tools provided in your operating system to scandisk
regularly or obtain a disk utility program like Norton Utilities to take the best car of your hard
drive possible. However, hard drives are sometimes like light bulbs—when you turn them on,
turning off the power may mark the last time they will ever work!
From: Karl Andrzejewski
• Boot with a Windows 98 startup disk.
• Get the CD-ROM support.
• Try reinstalling the OS. If this fails, boot to DOS, bring along my ZIP dive, fire it up in DOS
Guest mode.
• Copy any critical files to the ZIP, format the hard drive.
• Reinstall the OS backup system and boot files and let the user know they should keep their
sausage fingers on the TV remote and off of the computer.
From: Brad Marin
First find the disc parameters and enter them into the bios. iI the disc is accessible at that
point, I would copy the needed files to another drive. If the FAT is damaged I would run R
Studio and hope for the best.
From: Larry L. McNeese
I have in the past found that if you can find another hard drive of the same make and model,
you can remove the circuit board from the dead hard drive and replace it with the one from the
good hard drive. Many times the board is the problem, and it has saved the files and me
several times. Of course, when you get the files off you need, scrape the bad drive and replace
it with a new hard drive. I am taking in consideration that the tech doing this knows how to
properly set up a drive—v ery important.
From: Jeff Wilson
After going through the usual hoops, checking the BIOS setting, and booting with a boot disk.
With the current pricing on hard drives, I don't fight with drives any more, I pull out my copy
of R Studio and let it detect the drive.
• If it does, I will then install a drive equal to or greater than the old drive as master and set
the old drive as slave.
• I reboot and rerun (LF) and let it backup the drive.
• If the drive is three years or less old, then the manufacturer will cover the warranty and we
are all happy. This all assumes that the new master was seen by the BIOS. This works 95
percent of the time for me—game over, other than some diagnostics.
• If not, then I would reboot with the new drive by itself and see if it is detected.
• If not, I would install an IDE card and disable the onboard IDE, reboot and run (LF). This will
work 99.9 percent of the time and allows me to back up all of the data on the old drive. With
 
 
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