Yup Another Harddisk Problem

[Osede]

My housemate's SATA harddisk is suddenly working strange. If I plug it directly into any computer as a slave, the particular pc will blackout after the window loading screen. But if I unplug it, the pc will loads the window fines again. I have tried to get into the either normal or safe mode by using the harddrive directly, but the result it gave me is just the infinite of restarting whenever it went into the window loading stuff.

And I also had tried to use the window xp cd for recovery..... very unfortunately.... seem like I can't access its C:\ drive at all. (I have unplug all other external/primary/master/slave/whatever drive other than cd/dvd rom). Until this point I was thinking that it might be very bad sector case. Since that my housemate need to recover his paper work from this drive, is there any solution for it?

[Sigi]

download Knoppix and create a live cd
If it's something to do with windows, you might be able to pull the data off the drive. Hell, if the drive itself is failing, you might be able to recover some of the information.

[Cephius]

A few things, maybe you already did these but it was kinda unclear from your post, so forgive me if I suggest stuff you've already done.

Make sure you put the pins in the back of the hard drive so it is "Cable Select" - xp machines typically do not use the master/slave configuration as it's outdated. Double check there arent any pins bent or missing and that your SATA cable is seated correctly on the mobo.

If the disk still doesn't boot when it's the only hard drive hooked up, pop in the windows recovery CD and boot to that. Press F8 upon startup and select your DVD drive, it shouldn't matter if your hard drive boots or not. If the CD loads ok, press R on the first screen to get into the recovery console. Do a chkdsk /r to repair the bad sectors on your hard drive and (hopefully) make it bootable. Note it's taken me as many as 4 run-throughs of chkdsk to finally repair the hard drive.

If all else fails, you can get a USB adapter like the one below and see if windows can recognize the drive via USB. I've had plenty of hard drives that I could never get to boot, but hooking them up via a USB cable allowed me to extract the data from them.

http://www.usbgear.com/computer_cabl...77%2C141%2C142

If that doesn't work, there are programs that recover data from a failed hard drive. It is a long extensive process and many of the files are corrupted anyway. There are also recovery services, but at like $500+ a pop I doubt you'll want to do that for a paper.

[levish]

try like the other poster said using Cable Select (CS) and using the hard drive on the other channel (the one your CD/DVD drives would be on) if you just need to get some stuff off.

[Vyvian]

SATA and slave.. what am I reading wrong here? I've installed at least 50 of those types of disks into computers and they had no master/slave/CS jumper.

The SATA power connector and the SATA cable can be pretty loose sometimes, make sure they're in firmly, if it won't boot then you may have to use a USB-SATA converter or a SATA hard drive enclosure. Or you can run a disk checking utility off of a cd.

Just to confirm though, we are talking about SATA the thin plugs that have 1 disk per cable, or IDE, the fat cables that plug into a bunch of pins, that can have 2 plugs master and slave.

[Killgannon]

OP says its sata
make sure you try a KNOWN working cable, the cables can go bad at random some times apparently (mine did... and broke my RAID for a few days -.-;;... but only a few days <3 newegg) otherwise only plug it and a CD rom in, download knoppix or some other linux live CD (or a bart pe CD if you wanna use windows... which isnt too smart in this instance) and see what you can recover, if you can get in their and mount it then you can move the files either to a samba share (windows file sharing in linux if you dont know) or an FTP server and save his files for him... if its starting to boot windows, its probably not an issue with the drive itself... make sure that you are seeing the drive in the bios, and that if you have both drives connected make sure you are seeing both.

edit: if its IDE then make sure its CS or set to Slave or set it to master and do as above with it on the opposite channel as the CD rom drive (only the drive and the CD rom drive plugged in, unplug all other drives) as stated SATA no longer has CS/Master/Slave thats an attribute of IDE, SATA are only one drive per cable per interface on the motherboard/controller card. also remember that with IDE drives the different companies WD, lolmaxtor, lolseagate, roflmaohitachi are all different about how you set up for CS/Slave/Master

[Osede]

well, I have been tried to use knoppix to recover the data for the whole night. Fortunately the document data still able to recover and burn into dvd-r/cd-r.

The only feeling I have it might be there is a large of bad sector inside the hard drive. Knoppix able to recognize all of 3 partitions, but it only able to open and view 2 of them. And also, some of the files gave me some input/ouput errors when I try to copy them into my dvd-r, while others files are fine to be copied.

[Sigi]

Congratulations: you have a failing hard drive.

As a suggestion to your friend, STRONGLY recommend he start saving his important documents on a memory key, dvd-r, and an external hard drive.

Backups are made of puppies, kittens and 100-proof win.

[Killgannon]

Congratulations: you have a failing hard drive.

As a suggestion to your friend, STRONGLY recommend he start saving his important documents on a memory key, dvd-r, and an external hard drive.

Backups are made of puppies, kittens and 100-proof win.

yes.

i swear when people bring me pcs and their like "I CANT DO ANYTHING" and i find its the HDD and i'm like "well did you back up your important stuff" and they say "no cant you retreive it" and you have to be like "well no i can't sorry you're fucked" then they flip out and you're like "well tough shit dumbass back up your shit multiple times, NOTHING IS 100% EVER"

[Cephius]

Congratulations: you have a failing hard drive.

As a suggestion to your friend, STRONGLY recommend he start saving his important documents on a memory key, dvd-r, and an external hard drive.

Backups are made of puppies, kittens and 100-proof win.

yes.

i swear when people bring me pcs and their like "I CANT DO ANYTHING" and i find its the HDD and i'm like "well did you back up your important stuff" and they say "no cant you retreive it" and you have to be like "well no i can't sorry you're fucked" then they flip out and you're like "well tough shit dumbass back up your shit multiple times, NOTHING IS 100% EVER"

You can preach this til you're blue in the face, 99% of common PC users don't backup anything until they experience a complete HD failure that fucks them over. It's a sad truth!

[Vyvian]

You can preach this til you're blue in the face, 99% of common PC users don't backup anything until they experience a complete HD failure that fucks them over. It's a sad truth!

I've had PC users be idiots and not back things up right AFTER they had already experienced a complete HD failure...

[Sigi]

You can preach this til you're blue in the face, 99% of common PC users don't backup anything until they experience a complete HD failure that fucks them over. It's a sad truth!

I've had PC users be idiots and not back things up right AFTER they had already experienced a complete HD failure...

I need to make an image sticker, or come up with a meme image JUST FOR THIS
/bg, don't fail me now!