Hard Drive Crash

[Tbone]

It appears that, while playing MxO tonight, my hard drive crashed. I got the blue screen of death and then, while trying to reboot, got a disk read error and have not been able to fix it. I'm on my roommate's computer right now. I restarted it a few times and one of those times either smoke or dust came shooting out of my computer. It doesn't look good. My roommate is gonna take it into work (Circuit City) tomorrow. I've lost a lot of stuff and I'm not happy. It may be a while before I can get back.

[Adad]

I'm sorry TBone, hope they can restore as much as possible...

[Anonymous]

Yea I have backed up my HD because last night while doing a word document my comp froze for about 10 seconds and then my Mobo started beeping.  Not good.  It could be any day now for my HD to crash aswell.

Although I thought it was funny that it did it during a Microsoft Word document, I guess my HD doesnt like Term papers.

[Anonymous]

Don't flame me for suggesting it, but get a backup solution.  I use a network drive now (previously I had nothing).  The Maxtor stuff is really good, OneTouch and their media drives can both do incremental network backups to any timetable.  Just my two pence

[Eroz]

If you dont get anything back from Circut City, I would suggest trying Bart PE before you go doing anything to the harddrive (like reformatting it.) Bart PE worked good for me, I got the information I wanted off the disk then reformatted it.

[Anonymous]

I have heard many good things about BART PE, I agree with Eroz.  I have used Powerquest Lost & Found before and found that to be excellent, but now Symantec owns them I don't know if that product is still being produced

[Tbone]

From what I heard, information recovery usually costs thousands of dollars and was pretty much only for large businesses. I haven't heard of BART PE. My friend suggested putting the drive in the freezer for a while and then trying to boot it up long enough to get data from it.

[Da6onet]

In my experience, harddrives usually fail because of mechanical reasons (ie, the pins get misaligned or plug adapter is fried from a surge) rather than a material failure (the shiny disc loses it's integrity or magnetic orientation), so hopefully it can be fixed with new parts. Else the only way to attempt data retrieval is a painstakingly slow process of looking at each sector with the equivalent to an electron microscope to see if there is any stable data left.

[Styan]

yea freezing it worked when an older drive of mine crashed... hope you get it all worked out soon T.

[Eroz]

Bart PE works only in the case of software problems, if its a mechanical problem Bart PE won't do a thing for it.

[Kosila]

Yeah hard drives don't last forever... I've had only one crash on me before.

[Anonymous]

Let's hope the hard disk just corrupted from a power surge then, you shouldn't have too much trouble getting that back

[Tbone]

Um, so a guy showed up today, hard drive in hand, and installed the new one. I tried installing Windows XP - doesn't work. It is not reading the new drive during installation. I can't even create a new partition. I definiely need help. I tried calling support and they said they were away on vacation. I called the tech guy who installed it and he said XP may not recognize my drive and I may need to create a special boot disk or something. Arg! Nothing is working!

[Lits]

At this point... I would just get a new one and try to restore everything I could... I'm sorry.

[Tbone]

I did get a new one. Good news is I figured out how to manually install the hard drive, so I'm currently installing Windows XP. Looks like I'm starting the long process of reinventing my computer.