Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
allowing the O/S to find it. If no viruses are found...run a scandisk (from the floppy or from
Safe Mode) and make sure there isn't too much corruption.
• Corruption or not...it's time to back up your important files and format the drive. This may be
all that's needed to restore a drive to a functional state.
• If after the format there are still problems...trash the drive. Don't take any chances with a
flaky hard drive.
• If the suspect drive is a Winnt drive...there are not a whole lot of options. Follow the steps
above to the point of rebooting the system.
• In the case of NT (if it is not BIOS related), you will generally get a ntoskrnl error and the
system will halt. Otherwise...the BSOD is always a possibility.
• To lessen the chances of losing all of your data, boot with a clean diskette (Dos or Win95)
and run a setup from the NT floppies.
• Choose the option to repair the existing install, selecting all of the options of what to repair.
• If this works, the worst thing that will happen is you will have to reinstall your applications to
reregister them in the system registry (which will be replaced).
• In the event that the drive will not boot at all, take the drive to another machine and slave it
to an existing hard drive (preferably with NT as you won't see the NTFS partitions otherwise).
• Boot the second machine and see if the drive is visible from explorer...if it is...lucky you!
• Back it up pronto.
• If you cannot see the drive because it has an NTFS partition and the machine you're using is
Win95...there is a utility available called NTFSDos.
• Get this...it's an invaluable resource for NT techs. It allows you to boot from a DOS floppy
and see the NTFS partitions from the command prompt. You can then copy or backup
necessary files prior to a re-format.
• If the drive is still dead in the water after all of this...chances are it's going to stay that way
but I haven't come across too many drives I couldn't re-animate. :-)
From: Jamey Copeland
Make sure the drive's data ribbon cable is connected securely at both the drive and the
controller. If the cable is damaged, try a new one. Enter the CMOS setup and make sure that
all the parameters entered for the drive are correct.
Boot from a floppy disk and try accessing the hard drive. If that is possible, then it is probably
because boot files are missing or corrupt. If that is the case, use a third party software fix kit.
Try Sysing the c drive if it is visible from dos.
Check the power connector.Replace the hard drive...hehe.
From: George Rosser
• The first thing I would try would be to make a boot disk from another machine and boot up
the machine and see if it can read the drive.
• If that didn't work, check the settings for the drive and the size of the drive if the user has
been playing around with the system. It is possible they changed the LDA or other settings.
• If all else fails, look at the user and tell them that they just learned a lesson the hard way tell
the user that they should invest in a tape backup or similar item when the new drive is
purchased...
