Hard Drive problems

[Apollyon]

Ok, a while ago my harddrive decided to just fail on startup. I booted windows on my second HDD and had to cope for a bit. The next day my first drive started working again. Scan disk ran and only a few files were badly corrupted, nothing important. I thought that that spelt the end of the problem but about a week ago I booted up my comp and again the HDD failed. I waited for a bit thinking it would solve itself, and lo and beholdf it did in a few hours. I was relieved so I got back to doing things. However, within a few hours it simply disconnected itself and failed while Windows was booted. It's been about 5 days now and it shows no signs of fixing itself. Occasionally it recognises the HDD on startup and tries to boot from it. The windows on this HDD doesnt work properly so I have to restart using ctrl-alt-del and set bios to auto-boot from the secondary HDD. Once the comp begins to startup again the HDD fails again. Does anyone know anyway I can at least save my data from the disc?

Thanks in advance.

[Andrew]

So now you can not get into windows at all? Or sometimes when you do get in it shuts off at anytime it wants?

I'm not very good with anything but windows problems.

[Apollyon]

The windows on the HDD that keeps failing doesnt work so I have to boot from the windows on my working HDD.

[gryphon]

If possible change the power connector that is connected to the failing harddrive.

If the problem still happends just hope that you'll be able to copy the data of it while your OS is booted from the other disk and copy all of it in time. If it is a failing harddrive, and you don't wan'na take it to a company that can take the data of it [ or would try to change the disks yourself which is not preferable ] there is not much alse you can do.

Just do a lot of boots and hope it get's recognised and you'll be able to read from it. ..

[Nyarlathotep]

Try disconnecting power from cd and cd rewriter if you have.. See if the comp boots up again..

[Apollyon]

I'll try that stuff out soon and get back to you. Thanks.

[Apollyon]

Well, first I tried disconnecting my two CD drives and floppy drive. The same problem persisted. Next I swapped the power wires that lead to my CD drives with those that I'm using for the HDDs. Again the same problem. I guess this problem must be internally in the HDD in question or possibly messed up IDE cables or whatever. Any ideas?

[number6]

Hard drives are very hard to troubleshoot. I would suggest pulling out the disks and inspecting the jumpers and pins to make sure everything is set correctly. You may also want to flash your BIOS on the motherboard if a newer version of the BIOS is available. It really sounds like a hardware failure and there is not much you can do when that happens. If the data is worth a lot to you ther are very expensive ways to retrieve it, but it is usually not worth the expense.

[Apollyon]

Well hopefully I can make Mesh (the manufacturer) replace it and retrieve the data as it's still under warranty. Before that though I'll try it in a different machine...

[gryphon]

I thought most manufactorers just replace or make your disk when you send it up under warranty. They are not responsible for tha data on it nor will you get it back I thought :-

[Apollyon]

Unlike most companies Mesh tends to be more helpful, so I have high hopes. I should be able to save a fair bit of data anyway so there's no big deal.

[Apollyon]

Ok, a little update. The Harddrive now seems to boot up without failure almost everytime, however, now when I try to access the HDD once in Windows, it says "Drive is corrupted and unreadable". It won't let me run dskchk on it (which in the past fixed problems like this). Any ideas?

[Cyborg]

Is it possible to format it?

[Apollyon]

Yes it is, but I want to avoid that if possible.

[Nyarlathotep]

What does scandisk do (make sure it's scanning thurough)?

[Apollyon]

Lol, scandisk does bugger all. I click start and it just closes itself. :(

[Nyarlathotep]

So the way to fix the errors aren't working. Seems to me there are two options.. format, or change it for another..

[gryphon]

that's kind of funny I'd admit :-[ But still you always hate it when it does that.

Can you run scandisk with the troubeling harddrive turned off in your BIOS ?

IF you would format it I suggest removing the partition on it first, then repartition and format if you know how to do that.

[Apollyon]

I can run scandisk as it is, it just refuses to scan this HDD. As for formatting... I'll leave it for a bit and if it doesn't sort itself out then I guess I'll have to...