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Goodbye to my computer....

M

MaJ-ReD

n00b
Joined
Sep 10, 2002
Messages
61
Well, sunday night I was having a good game of Counter-Strike, and all of a sudden my mic cuts out. And then my internet dies. I figured it was just a fluke, so I closed down the game, and I open up sound recorder to test out my mic. Sure enough, nothing. So I go on my other computer, check it's internet and it's working. But I reset my router anyway, and still my computer does not pick up an IP.

Well, I plugged the cable into my other onboard nic, and sure enough instantly it picks up an IP and I'm back online. I played around for the rest of the night. Monday afternoon I called up the store I bought my parts from, and I set up an RMA on the board. I get there, give in my baby, and pick up the Soyo Dragon Lite they gave me for a loaner board while mine was gone.

When I get back home, I spend a good 3 hours trying to get that board working, and of course it ended up being something so stupid I felt like killing myself. The board has a built in safety feature that shuts off the system when it can't read the fan speed. Naturally I don't have a standard fan on my board, and I've got it plugged directly into my power supply through a molex connector. Anyway, I plugged in one of my case fans into CPUFAN1 and sure enough the system boots. I got into the BIOS set all my settings, and try and figure out how to clock my CPU to what it should be at (I hate that BIOS so much.. grrrr). Anyway, I manage to get it where it should be. I let the system boot up, expecting a blue screen of death like when I swapped out my motherboard on my other system.

Naturally WinXP comes with a repair feature in the installer, and Microsofts webpage says to use that when you swap out motherboards. The system boots, blue screen of death, and it reboots. I was happy. I popped in my CD, and missed the key punch to boot from CD. The system starts to boot, and offers to log last known good config, but instead knowing it'll crash again, I reset it. I boot up on CD, go into the installation.

Now here is the problem. The WinXP installer doesn't detect my installation. The drive is found, the partitions come up the right size, but I am only offered to format, not reinstall. So I couldn't figure out what was going on. I took out the CD, and tried the bootup again. Now the system tells me "MASTER BOOT DISK FAIL", the one thing I DID NOT want to see.

I took the drive out, and brought it to school with me this morning. I popped it in my system here as a slave. Of course, the system detects the drive in the BIOS, the drive is found in the Task Manager, and it says "This Device is working properly", but yet it does not list in My Computer. The computer does not give the drive a letter, not either of the partitions.

Does anyone have any ideas of things I could try out before I RMA the drive and lose 4 years of data?
 
Same thing just happened to me recently. I lost 60+ GB of data on a 80GB drive, when I booted to an XP cd, and it knocked out the partitions. Some of that data lost was from over 7 years. There's no reason for what happened, just that it had to do with booting to the XP cd, which wasn't a problem in the past.

The drive functions perfectly now....... and has a lot of free space:confused:
 
One thing I'd Try is Get a File recovery Utility

And try and recover as much as you can off the drive.


That happened to me with Partion Magic one time, will never use that program again.....
 
Try Knoppix.
Its a linux distro that boots off a cd, and then you can read your hard drive.
Your HD is intact, dont be scared of the linux bootup.
Once it loads, use your burner to copy all the stuff you need and then format.
It saved my life once.
 
When you put the drive in as a slave, are you sure you have the jumpers on the drive set correctly?

Also, does the system you put the drive in as a slave have WinXP or Win2k installed on it? If the system you are putting the drive in doesn't have the NTFS file system, the drive may not show up in My Computer. Also, if you had any of WinXP's "drive protection stuff" the encryption or whatever enabled, then it's usually more difficult to get the drive to show up where you can use it in another system.

As far as your other problem goes, I'm not sure what you can do. I would see if I could borrow a drive from someone and install WinXP on it to try and access your data that way. It may be better than trying it on the other system you had the drive in.

And from now on, backup everything you want to keep. In a case like this, I'm glad I have a second system I can use while I'm waiting on a mobo RMA.
 
Originally posted by gigabyte1024
B-A-C-K-U-P

>Br@d
Click to expand...

gigbyte1024, you are an asshole and I hope you die a horrible death. Actually, a really long horrible death.

And now for the real reply.
Alright, well I tried a data recovery software, it found a lot of the files, but it's hard to filter through most of it, as this software is finding files that have been deleted. I noticed that a lot of the stuff is not there. For example in Documents and Settings, only my user folder is listed, not that of my Mom or my Brother.

And, the system that I tried the drive in was a Win2k Server machine, and only after I made the post had I realized it didn't have any windows updates. So I'm thinking that was the issue there. I'm going to try the drive as a slave drive in my other XP machine, which at the time was inaccessable.

If all else fails I'm going to try that Linux bootable disk. Sounds like it might be helpful, however it confuses the hell outta me, lol. I'm willing to try anything. Really all I have to do is get the data off the drive and onto whatever other media I can find. I have a little over 200 blank CDs i can use for backup if really need be. Either way, if I get the files off the drive or not, I'm RMAing it regardless.

This isn't the first time the drive came up DISK BOOT FAIL. Every time before this I figured it was just the motherboard, since I had been having problems with many parts of the board in the past.

By the way, thanks to everyone that has the decency to reply with something HELPFUL, unlike some who feel the need to post garbage or insults. And yes, I'm talking to you gigabyte1024. You are garbage.
 
luckily we have a second computer too (Maj's brother), but thats no good. all our stuff was on the other one. as for backups, most of what we lost was a large MP3 collection (in the neighborhood of 1600 songs). I don't know about you, but i really hate backing up that many songs. makes for a lot of overlaped copies and such.
 
the fan thing happend with me a bit over a year ago when i was building a box with a soyo board.
 
Originally posted by MaJ-ReD
gigbyte1024, you are an asshole and I hope you die a horrible death. Actually, a really long horrible death.
Click to expand...

I apolgize if my atempt at advice on this subject offended you.
I was trying to be clear and consise about the importance of a routine backup procedure.

Personally I use a DVD+R drive and backup my imporntant data about once every 2 or 3 months.

At work I use a Dell PowerVault 132T Dual drive autoloading device. Each tape currently backs up almost 200GB of data.

Hopfully losing so much data (I hope you get at least some of it back) will convince you to implement a suitable backup solution of your own.

>Br@d
 
See, now that was a decent reply.
I used to do regular backups. But I guess over time, since nothing ever happened to any of my files/drives I just lost interest in it.

Of course, now I strongly regret it. I did manage to see the files, and access a few of them, small things such as images and stuff. I haven't yet been able to copy any of the files onto another drive, because every peace of software I've found you have to pay for, and they are all in the neighborhood of 100USD, which I don't have.

If anyone knows of a free software, please let me know. I really need these files :(.

BTW: I still haven't tried that Linux suggestion. I'm about to now actually.
 
Okay, bro... before you give up on windows XP, you have to understand how to add a drive that has been formatted. Kinda like mounting one of those damn compressed drives back in the "old days".

First, in the BIOS boot-up screen, make sure the drive is listed. If not, you have messed up the hardware install. Now, assuming it is there, boot to windows. If you open "My Computer" it will not list your drive. This is okay. Now for the fun bit. :)

Start-->Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management

On the left hand side, click on "Disk Management".

You will see all of your dives on the bottom of the window (including CD's, you will have to scroll). Then you right click on your new drive (might be giving you a messed up letter, you can change that later, if you wish) and make it active.

BLING-BLING!

Hope this helps!

-Skystalker
 
My problem isn't that I don't know how to do it. I've already done all that. The drive comes up as Unpartitioned space according to the manager. So, I can't give it a drive letter.

I don't want to format it either, because I'm affraid that will make getting my files back even harder.

I do have a question however. If I do format the drive, and install Windows on it again, can I:

1. Search for deleted files on the same drive as the OS is installed, or do I need to have the computer in a seperate machine.

2. Will the OS install it's files into the same place on the disk as the last time in installed it? Since I'm formatting completely, and the partitions are the same size as last time (to the sector), I'm going to assume so, but I'm asking just to be sure.

If it does install to the same place, then I may try and format the drive, and then install the OS again. I do know that when you format a drive, the files remain unchanged, other then being put in a "state" where they can be overwritten without asking. So if the OS goes to the same spot, I should be able to get back most of my files.
 
If you format the drive, don't expect to get any data off the drive that was previously on it unless you want to buy some really expensive software that may get your data back.

If there is no way for you to get the drive in another system and copy over the files or get the installation on the system repaired or possibly installed over, then I don't see much of a chance for you to get your data.
 
I will repeat it again.
Get knoppix.
Boot from it and it will detect all you hardware and install drivers automaticaly.
If you think you will get lost, you are wrong. Knoppix is easier than Windows.
Then you can burn your files to a CD/DVD, or install a second HD and just move the files. Then format the drive and do a fresh install.
 
Alright, well that's awsome and all....
I'm on the OS right now. It's a really cool operating system actually. I like the interface, rofl.

But it isn't helping.
I can't access the drives. I keep getting the same error, and my guess is it is because the drives do not have the correct partition table, and are unknown devices.

Error:
Could not mount device.

The reported error was:

mount: I could not determine the file system type, and none was specified.
 
Alright, well the Linux thing didn't help me at all..
But I think I've come to a conclusion. I beleive the errors were nothing but a horrible virus that hit the internet this weekend. Turns out the same problem happened to 3 of my friends over the weekend.

Mechanically the drive seems fine. I managed to get all the files I could off the drive, and I am currently running a new fresh install of XP on the drive that was broken before. I haven't seen anything noticably wrong since.

Lucky me.
 
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