Well crumb!

My hard drive has crashed for the second time in the past year. A few months ago it crashed and I could not even get it to be recognized as a slave drive. A couple of weeks ago it crashed and I was able to recover it, but today, it really bit the dust. So bad, fdisk will not even recognize it.

I have Norton Sysem Works 2005, but can't figure out how to get it to boot to the Recovery Disk. Anyone know how to do this?

My question: If I can't get Norton Recovery to fix it, is there any inexpensive software that will make it bootable again without forematting it?

 

I dont think so, you might be able to boot from a windows 2k or xp cd and go into recovery console and try a fixmbr, but you will probably have to reformat.

Anytime a drive gives me the least bit of problem or acts screwy it gets replaced.Had to recover and lost tooooo much data to push my luck on a flakey drive.

 

if the computer doesnt recognize it, its time to toss it.

You gave the key point
"A few months ago it crashed.."

At any sign at all of harddrive failure, toss it / RMA it. I had a new SATA-II 160gg.. four months into its life locked up while gaming, rebooted to a "system32\config missing or corrupt". i ran chkdsk through recovery console, and it booted up and worked fine. I copied my data off and sent it back to get replaced.

hard drive problems are always reoccuring. definetly not worth the risk trying to reuse even if its stioll recognized and you can reformat and reinstall, not worth the headaches at all!

 

I forgot to add that it crashed while I was doing Norton Ghost to another drive I bought today.

Since it got two drives in less then a year, I'm leaning toward mother board problems. This one is about two years old and is due for an upgrade anyway. I'll keep my little Celeron 2.4 and drives to put back in it.

 

I have a special plan for drives like that.

7mm Rem Mag loaded with Nosler Ballistic tips at 25 yrds. It will turn a hard drive inside out.

 

More information is needed. What is the brand and size of your drive? Was it formated in FAT32 or NTFS and by which program. Motherboard make and model? OS? There may still be something you can do to recover it and your problem may not even be the hard drive itself. Bad RAM can do the same thing.

 

Thanks Bart,

I never thought about the memory. I think I have an old hard driver around here some where with an operatiog system on it that I'm going to try. We're having our DTR monthly meeting this weekend, so it may be Monday before I get all the info together. I do know it's a Maxtor drive, but I've used so many different MB's, I don't remember which one is in there. I'm running XP SP2.

Another reason I'm thinking MB failure is that I run Norton Check It weekly, and none of the components have showed a problem.

 

If you have a slave drive on the same IDE buss it can cause grief on the master. I just had a pc eat 3 HDD's ,or so I thought, and after much frustration it turned out to be the slave yet it appeared ok in windows and the master kept getting corrupt files etc etc etc.
Good luck.

 

As far as how to boot to the recovery disk you need to change the boot order in your bios to make it try to boot from the CD drive first before it tries to boot from the hard drive.

 

When ever mine catches computer herpaaidsarea I always end up having to reformat my HD. I always have to start in the setup screen, you know, shut the computer down and hold the ESC key when you turn it on. I have to select the CD-ROM as the boot drive to get it to boot up and start with the recovery disc.

 

Take the drive out and freeze it over night. Then try to get it to boot again. That has worked in the past for me. Once it fires up though I would have an external drive hooked up so you could copy the stuff you want.

 

Thanks for all the tips.

I hooked the c:/ drive and the new one that was connected to the USB up to my laptop and neither is recognizable.

Now for the latest fiasco:
I went today and bought an ABIT AI7 mother board. I gave the guy my processor and memory info, and he fixed me up with a (new) refurbished board. Took it home, put everything together and...Beep,Beep,Beep.... I got to checking, and my 266 memory wouldn't work in the board. Since the memory is old, I went back to Microcenter and upgraded to 1 gig. Back to the house, put the new memory in and....Beep,Beep,Beep..... I got on the ABIT site to make sure my Celeron would work, and the site said Pentium 4 or Celeron. It's still beeping, but I'm formatting an old WD 80 gig HD just to have a clean drive for it to look at.
Next, I guess I'll start taking the hardware off a piece at a time to see if the ....Beep, Beep,Beep, will go away.

Very frustrating!

Any suggestions on the Beep, Beep, Beep.....?

 

Sounds like a hardware conflict. Did you get it to boot into windows at all? USB doesn't work unless you get booted into windows. You might try pushing the f8 button and selecting step by step confirmation. That way you can isolate what the issue is. It will take awhile though. Recheck all of your cards and memory to make sure everything is seated properly. I would even remove any hardware that you don't need to boot into windows. Network card, modem, sound card etc. ( assuming that it isn't built in.) If it boots start adding the hardware one at a time until something fails. Then you'll know what to replace. Might want to double check your Bios settings too make sure that the correct memory clock and processor clock is selected. Does it count up the memory? Come to think of it ... it could be your processor too. Good luck and let us know what happens.

 

One more thing... the amount of beeps actually will tell you something too. Different Bios chips give a coded amount of beeps for troubleshooting purposes.

 

Beep Code Descriptions
1 short DRAM refresh failure
2 short Parity circuit failure
3 short Base 64K RAM failure
4 short System timer failure
5 short Process failure
6 short Keyboard controller Gate A20 error
7 short Virtual mode exception error
8 short Display memory Read/Write test failure
9 short ROM BIOS checksum failure
10 short CMOS shutdown Read/Write error
11 short Cache Memory error
1 long, 3 short Conventional/Extended memory failure
1 long, 8 short Display/Retrace test failed