Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
me to copy the data (or whole drive depending on the situation) to the spare drive for
safekeeping until the user can purchase a new drive. If this also fails, then once again the
hammer comes into play...this time to allow the user to beat the crap out of the old drive and
relieve the frustration of having lost everything because they thought "backups are for sissies."
From: Carla Maslakowski
Boot PC into setup and restore drive settings. CMOS battery must be dead which is why setup
lost settings. Replace CMOS battery in this PC and drive should keep settings.
From: Todd Layland
Pull the jumper on the motherboard that will reset the settings (bios, password, etc.) of the
system. If it boots, you know it was a config setting that screwed up. If it doesn't, well HD are
cheap.
From: Dale
First things...first:
• I would flush CMOS and then look at the drive and write down the correct drive settings for
Cylinder, Heads, and Sector.
• I would manually enter this data if auto detect could not figure it out.
• If unable to boot after manually setting up the drive, I would check settings in CMOS and
then boot from a floppy (THAT I WOULD HAVE BROUGHT WITH ME!) that contained sys.com,
fdisk.exe.
• After a successful boot to a floppy, I would do an FDISK/MBR and then reboot the system
and let it fallback to a backup MBR.
• If that failed, I would boot to a floppy and do a sys c: then reboot.
• If unable to access the drive after the mentioned steps, I would boot from floppy, change to
C: and attempt to recover as much as possible to floppies.
From: Ken Beckett
I would take the drive out of the PC it is in and take it to another PC put on the secondary IDE.
I would look up the drive parameters and enter those parameters in the bios. Start the PC and
hope to get the drive to run as a secondary drive.
From: NetMarkC
I've lost my "C: drive before and was able to get it back by removing and reinstalling the
CMOS battery.
From: dmo
Find out from user which OS he was running on the hard drive. Install a new drive as Primary
and the damaged drive as secondary. Install the same OS on the Primary drive and you should
be able to see all or most of the data on the second drive. Copy all data from secondary to the
Primary drive.
