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Helping a friend with his PC… Generic type, P2, 333MHz. Hitachi 20G HDD, 384mb SDRAM, internal CD-ROM and external (USB) burner. Running Win98 and AOL.
Working fine then started randomly rebooting on it's own. Checked out with Norton utilities from CD-ROM. Disk Doctor and Windoctor found no faults. Ran Spybot and deleted a couple of cookies. Ran RegSeeker and found no probs.
Next day, he called and said PC shut down again and when it restarted was running scandisk because "not shut down properly". I told him to shut it down and I'd look at it the next day.
Today I went over and tried a normal boot. After BIOS load got message "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". Also no primary master drive detected when BIOS loads. Manually rebooted and entered BIOS. Selected auto detect IDE and BIOS found no primary master drive. All zeros. Rebooted into windows boot disk and got following messages.
1. Windows detected no FAT or FAT32 partition on drive C:
2. Could be 3rd party partitioning software (not)
3. Could be a virus (possible)
Diagnostic tools successfully loaded on C:
A:\prompt flashing.
Best guess is HDD died. Factors.. Old drive, hours used unknown. No cooling fan in tower (except power supply fan)... Tower positioned inside cabinet with door closed. Probable cause of failure.. overheating.
Would appreciate any suggestions to further diagnose problem to confirm or refute overheating hypothesis.
Thanks in advance - Ray
I'm not too sure that the hard drive is dead. I agree with the overheating diagnosis. The initial reboots are often caused by CPU overheating. A low level format (write zeroes) just might restore the drive.
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If you haven't done so yet, open the case and make sure it's connected right. Maybe he got inside and fiddled around. The red stripped edge of the ribbon cable needs to be connected to the #1 pin side of both the HD and motherboard connectors.
Make sure the IDE controllers are enabled in cmos.
With the computer running, put your ear close enought to the HD to verify it's spinning. If it is spinning that doesn't guarantee it's good, but if it's not then it's definately bad.
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boot to a win98 floppy and then type "sys c:". That will transfer the system files back to the HD. Try a reboot. May need a full format as drew stated just to check if it's still good
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Go to Hitachi web site and down their hard drive diagnosis program and put it on a floppy and boot to DOS and run it, it will tell you if the HD if good or bad.
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Drive health test program for Hitachi hard drives are at the URL below.http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
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drew... 'preciate all input. Need all the help I can get.
DAVEINCAPS.. Always glad to see your response on a problem. Pretty sure the connections are not a [problem, but I'll certainly check it out. Also. have a stehoscope to listen to the ndrive.
wiggler14... Good thought. I'll give sys c: a try.
JPW.. got the downl;oad and created the floppy. Will give it a try tomorrow.
Much thanks to all and I'll let you know the results tomorrow.
Regards - Ray
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Opened the case this morning and found the following. Got a flash of optimism when I pushed on the mobo end of the IDE cable, thought it moved a bit. No such luck... booted and still no primary master drive detected. Shut down and dismounted the HDD so I could listen with a stethoscope. What I got was nada. Not a peep, whiz, whir or click. Dead, dead, dead. Installed an old drive I had and booted up just fine. Shows up as expected in BIOS load (post).
The really bad news is my friend was in the process of burning his stored photos to CD when all this happened. He lost some of them. Not sure how many or the subject matter. All that is for sure, is his wife is really upset. Anyone know of a way to retrieve the photos without resorting to a PC repair shop? I would imagine the process requires disassembly of the drive and some sort of setup to spin the disks. Oh well, never hurts to ask.
Thanks to all for the inputs... Regards - Ray
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If the motor's dead, I don't see a way. But if by chance it was a damaged circuit board you could swap it with another from the same type drive.
I've found though it's usually the motor and not the board.
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SYS C: won't work, because the drive isn't even recognized as C:.
You might try fdisk /MBR. It won't cause any harm, even if it doesn't help.
You might try installing it into another PC as slave & see if you can access it from within Windows.
There's a few free drive recovery software programs out there, but they (of course) won't help if you can't access the HD at all.
As a "Last Ditch Effort", when you've given up on all other possible solutions, you might want to try this...
Disclaimer...I have only read about this & have never had to personally try it myself...
Stick the HD into the freezer for 20-30 minutes, then try reinstalling it into the PC. You might get one last boot out of it, which may last long enough to finish transferring the pictures.
If you try this, post back with results.
Good luck.
Dave
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 Still Help Needed ! Syste...
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cd-rom not reading rewrit...
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