I've got twin hard drives that simultaneously failed today to replace in the morning and all the poxy software to reinstall (mercifully, all data fully backed up, at least I think it is) - you think you've got a problem?!!
Hard Drive failure
- Thread starter Shytalkz
- Start date
When my hard drive failed, I simply put it in another machine and all was well. if both have gone I would suspect a hardware problem and try the same
I managed to get it to boot once after it told me there was a HD failure on boot up, using the XP disk, frantically backed everything (I hope) to a remote drive, rebooted following a Norton Ghost install and nada, not even with the recovery disk, just grinds to a halt and won't let me use the recovery console.
Am aiming to slave them onto the new ones, just incase there's something I've forgotten, but chkdsk said there were irrecoverable errors, so it's not looking good...
Am aiming to slave them onto the new ones, just incase there's something I've forgotten, but chkdsk said there were irrecoverable errors, so it's not looking good...
It would be highly unusual for two drives to fail on the same day.
Or are they in a RAID?
Not that I'm aware of. I had two physical but three drives in total, one of which was partitioned, thus had C,D and E. D failed a long time ago, but I don't know if it was set up as C+D, C+E, or D+E. C was always my boot drive, E was where I kept everything, both now gone kaput, or so the pc tells me.
We had two power cuts this week and I didn't have that pc on a surge protector, so it might have been frazzed.
We had two power cuts this week and I didn't have that pc on a surge protector, so it might have been frazzed.
By default it's likely to be C+E with D on the second physical drive. What was the nature of D's kaputness?
There are many types of drive error; not all of them are irrecoverable.
In fact, more than half of the disk problems that I deal with are recoverable, and very simply.
You might not have realised it, but using Ghost to recover a disk that XP regards as faulty isn't a good course of action. Avoiding all write operations until the fault is diagnosed is the best thing.
Well I can imagine there being a potential (arf arf) for damaging the motherboard, but not so much a disk. It's definitely worth putting the suspect drive in a known good machine, or in a caddy, and seeing if it can be read.
Thanks for that Softus. The first death was preceeded a clonking noise as the pc was booted, lasting for about five mins or so. Eventually, it just disappeared from Explore, never to be seen again, leaving me with C and E drives.
Nothing as a warning this time, only the notification of failure on boot up.
Here's to a forthcoming day of messing around with the pc...
Nothing as a warning this time, only the notification of failure on boot up.
Here's to a forthcoming day of messing around with the pc...
Putting these two things together I have a hunch. Are you seeing something like this:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
C:\windows\system32\config\system
If so, then use F8 and elect to boot to "Last Known Good" configuration.
If that doesn't work, there is a method of doing a manual System Restore. If you can't find it then let me know.
