Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
From: Eric Springler
These are some of the things that I would do...
a) Check the cmos settings to be sure that they are correct for the drive.
b) Ask if the user wrote to the disk while the cmos settings were wrong. If they were, then try
and use those settings to retrieve some of the data. Sometimes data can be written to the disk
and retrieved even if the cmos settings are incorrect.
c) Boot off of a floppy disk with a recent virus scanner. It could be a simple virus.
d) If it's just a case of the disk not being bootable, do and FDISK /MBR to the drive, or do a
SYS C: off of a different Win98/95 boot disk. If it's NT, do a repair of boot/system files. It asks
for a repair disk, but you can use any old repair disc for that.
e) Stick the drive in another Win9X box (if it was a fat16/32 drive) and run
norton
disk doctor
(tm) on it. Sometimes Norton will recover enough of the directory listings for you to retrieve
some of the data
f) If none of these work, put 3 hard drives in a machine: 1) NT Workstation (or 95), 2) Bad
Drive, 3) exact model and size drive as the bad drive. Format drive 3, and do a sector-by-
sector copy of 2 onto 3 with something like
Diskprobe
.
g) Put the drive in a working Windows NT machine and use
R Studio
to recover the data. That's
about all that I can think of right now.
From: Gary Stevens
Welcome to the wonderful world of crashed computers.
To revive or attempt to revive a failed hard drive I would recommend the following steps:
1. Ascertain what the user was doing before it stopped.
2. Ask what they did to try and fix it.
3. Check the CMOS settings. Battery may have failed thereby dropping the configuration.
4. Boot from a GOOD floppy at DOS level, if possible. If it boots, see what is available on the
hard drive with a NO CHANGE examination.
5. Check the files, if available, with a NO CHANGE integrity disk process, like Norton's.
6. If data can be recovered then do so before taking any other steps. I would then clone or
copy the hard drive contents to another drive or location.
7. Remove the hard drive and test in another computer to confirm it is not a general I/O
communication failure.
8. Rebuild the system based on diagnosis. If all else fails, then take it to someone who really
knows what they're doing, sit down in the sun, and enjoy a
Budwiser
.
From: Jerry Pacheco
• Check to see if the drive spins up; if not, replace drive.
• If drive spins up, check cmos settings.
• If cmos settings are okay, check fdisk to see if partition is still accessible.
• If fdisk doesn't show partition, create partition and format drive (importance of backing up
data).
• If fdisk shows partition, check to see if you can access drive from prompt.
• If you can access drive, run sys.com to make drive bootable. Reboot from drive.
• If you can't access drive, run scandisk or
norton
utilities from floppy.
• If scandisk or
norton
fixes problem, reboot from drive.
