Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
• It may not be able to recover all files but this sometimes works. If that still did not work to
recover the data portion of the drive...
• I would probably take the new drive that I ordered and take the controller off of it and put it
on the failing drive. Many HD situations is not actually a failure in the surface of the HD but in
the controller failing due to the fact of the IC chips and many surface mount resistors and
capacitors which many times are already failing somewhat before leaving the manufacturer.
• They allow functionality for sometimes several years but you are tossing a coin with each
boot of the machine.
• But I digress, back to the controller... After switching controllers see if the drive is visible and
the data is in tact. If that does not work verify the drive is spinning up.
• If the drive is not spinning sometimes you can open the drive up and take a pencil eraser and
give the platter a little push and the drive will spin up. Of course, this is a last resort option
because you will void any warranty that is on the drive.
• I have even gone as far as taking a bad drive whose drive head was bad and removed the
platters and put them in a new drive's platters place.
• I had to do this with a UNIX server once because the company had not backed up any data
on its servers drive.
From: Zlito
• I always try to reset the defaults in the setup first.
• Then reboot see if the computer holds the info to see if the on-board battery is dead. It's
simple to replace and could save a lot of time.
• If not, maybe a voltage surge hit the cmos and cleared it. This could take some time to find
the settings the manufacturer used.
• Or find out if the hard drive had an overlay on it—older proprietary systems used them a lot.
If so, try reinstalling the overlay and see if that brings back c:\. If not, leave it with me for a
week and I will have it working at full steam.
From: Sasha Baer
I have just had this exact problem. I had a drive with an NTFS partition and a FAT partition.
The NTFS partition was my boot partition. Anyway, the sorry story was that my girlfriend hit
the power cord accidentally while doing the vacuuming and the resetting of the computer
caused the boot sector and the MFT to corrupt. After much searching, I found a helpful article
(
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q153/9/73.asp)
on the MS site describing
how to repair the boot sector. I built a new NT machine and went through this process. I could
then mount the partition but it still showed up as unknown in Disk Administrator. I looked for
and went through the instructions. The only real annoying this is that the demo copy only
allows for small files to be restored.
From:Jim Claypool
Start with the basics:
• Reseat the IDE cable at all connection points, checking for bent pins.
