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| Thread ID: 40426 | 2003-12-07 20:13:00 | HDD died a horrible death?? | Mary H (769) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 198202 | 2003-12-07 20:13:00 | A friend's computer has started displaying an "invalid system disk" msg on boot, even though there is no disk in the floppy drive. I had thought the floppy drive was faulty as it has been in the past, and changed the boot order (hdd first) but still no go. I tried putting in a win98 boot disk, but even this didn't seem to work. There seem to be issues with detecting the C: drive.. I notice in the system summary table that appears just before the windows boot screen that "Primary Master Disk - none" is visible. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Am I correct in thinking the hdd has died? The machine is running win98, with an Athlon 1800 and Asus MB. The one and only hdd is a Samsung 40 gig. |
Mary H (769) | ||
| 198203 | 2003-12-07 20:33:00 | First thing is to make sure the connectors at the HDD are fully pushed in. Also check the other end of the wide (usually grey) cable. Then check with the detect function in the BIOS. Using a boot disk, enter the command fdisk, and then "view partitons" from the menu. If it still is not recognising the HDD, then, 99% chance it has died. |
Pheonix (280) | ||
| 198204 | 2003-12-07 20:34:00 | Unfortunately it does very much appear that the hard drive has died. Hopefully it is still under warranty? | tommy (2826) | ||
| 198205 | 2003-12-07 20:38:00 | Detect function wasn't working last night, but had not yet opened the case and checked the cables.. this is the next step I guess! No warranty as far as I know. Also no backups, but this serves the friend right I think! I have been offering to back it up for her for months. |
Mary H (769) | ||
| 198206 | 2003-12-07 20:45:00 | I reckon that about 90% of people only realise the pain of lost information AFTER they have had a failure. I still remember my close call. A 6 month old HDD, and I was trialling some backup software for a client and it died completely. Now I have that program running permanently. :) Good luck. Oh, the Samsung have a 3 year warranty too FYI. |
Pheonix (280) | ||
| 198207 | 2003-12-07 20:48:00 | Ahh, she may just be lucky then with the warranty - machine was bought 01/01! Thanks to both of you.. nice to have some input from others :) |
Mary H (769) | ||
| 198208 | 2003-12-07 20:49:00 | I'll check all cable connections - both power and signal cables to the HDD concerned to make sure that they are all OK. | bk T (215) | ||
| 198209 | 2003-12-07 21:45:00 | Mary, you may be able to plug the hard drive into another machine and access it from that. It may be that the boot up area is damaged. Set the jumper on the back to slave and see whether it picks it up. If it does, take the opportunity to copy all you can to the donor machine's hard drive or onto CD. I had the same thing happen 2 days ago with my in-law's PC. My system was able to access the info on it, but for some reason theirs didn't even detect the drive. We put a new hard drive in theirs, which detected ok, set up windows again, and copied the documents, emails, favorites, pictures etc back over from a CD. J :D |
Jester (13) | ||
| 198210 | 2003-12-07 21:48:00 | Thanks Jester - a good suggestion, I may just try that. | Mary H (769) | ||
| 198211 | 2003-12-07 23:20:00 | Mary Someone on PF1 had asimilar problem on as win 98 machine recently. Do a search. I suggest a boot disc (if you don't have one download from www.bootdisk.com) and try fdisk/mbr to rebuild the master boot record. I'm not sure whether win98 has the fix mbr option eg, either boot to boot a disc or 98 cd. The problem may not be a dead HDD but a corrupted file or sector on the HDD. If the cable checks don't work out try resetting the BIOS to default settings then dectect the drive. Cheers Murray P |
Murray P (44) | ||
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