Hard Drive could be u/s

[joinerjohn]

Hi guys. tonight when I got back from work, my computer had frozen, so did a restart. It doesn't find the HDD and is trying to boot from either usb or dvd/cd drive. Seems to me the HDD has given up the ghost.
Questions now,, It's a SATA HDD and is easily (seems) replaceable,, Is this an easy thing to do? Never changed a HDD before.

Cheers JJ

 

[xr4x4]

Easy to change, it's getting the software back on that cause problems.

 

[Monkeh]

Just check the connections on the drive itself first. SATA connectors sometimes work loose.

 

[joinerjohn]

Have checked all the connections Monkeh, still no joy. Mind you the HDD is about 5 yrs old. Was 160gb HDD and about 85-90% full. Bloody thing, er indoors comp monitor packed in last week and I got a s/h 19" widescreen monitor so she could have my monitor.. (yeh right, till I walked in the door with it) she claimed it as hers and now I have to plead with her for a go on this one.

 

[^woody^]

It may not be the actual disk at fault, it could be a problem with the windows boot files, or check your BIOS to see if there has been a change to the boot priority

 

[joinerjohn]

Had a look at the bios Woody, Sata drive not detected , so it tries to boot from D or E drive ( which it can't as there's nothing in either dvd drive to boot from)
Looks like buying a new SATA HDD and installing. Grrrrrrr

 

[xr4x4]

they cant be alot more than £20 now?

 

[Monsterminty]

try changing to a different sata port on the motherboard.

 

[joinerjohn]

Tried all 4 SATA ports on the Motherboard Monster, but no joy. Ahh well have to look online for a new HDD and get my nephew to load Win7 on to it.

 

[EFCLee1]

WWW.aria.co.UK

 

[joinerjohn]

Thanks for the link Lee, but I ordered a new HDD yesterday. It's already arrived and installed into the computer. Firing it up shows the Sata HDD has been detected. Now to find someone with an XP dvd or Win7 dvd and install an operating system (nah, ,, my nephew is coming round later with one or the other)
Whilst researching the HDD I did find a page on Seagate's site saying there was a known fault with the firmware of certain HDD's (probably out of warranty now), but I know the drive spins up when the computer is switched on. They gave complete instructions on how to fix them if it was either of two problems with the drive (at least fix it enough to recover data) Jiggered if I can now find it though.
Hopefully, happy days will be restored within a few hours and if I can find the page on Seagate's site again, I might be able to recover the data on the u/s HDD.

 

[Monkeh]

If you give me the model and serial number I can tell you if it affects your drive or not. But I don't think they made a 160GB 7200.11.

 

[joinerjohn]

Thanks Monkeh, I've just downloaded Ubuntu on er indoors computer and loaded that on to a usb pendrive and have run it from that on my computer at the moment. Just trying it before installing it on to this computer. Taking a bit of getting used to, but at least I'm blazing away on the internet now. At least, I can find and print of the instructions , without the constant "How long will you be ?" etc in the background.