IDE HDD at deaths door, how to fix?

[JRRTolkien]

As it says, I had a system, Athlon 2800, 2xHDD IDE system, one had ME on, one had XP on, dual boot, then the ME system became obsolete, so use the XP, then it failed in a desolate way, no bluescreen, no BIOS boot even, after a powercut.

At the same time my brother decided, because of receipt of an Apple compy for free, he would play with his Dell PC, saw a red switch on the back that said 110/220, and thought it would be fun to see what it did. BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, I ended up with a system, Pentium 3400, ye olde IDE disks, plus SATA disk from the Dell, 2gb memory out of the remains.

BUT the IDE XP disk is murdered, with ALL my data on. It is either recognised, or not, or I can access data or not, depending on I suppose the temperature in the room?

Can I fix the Hdisk, and which processor is better? A Pentium D dual core 3400, or Athlon 2800? on Windows 7? I had to ring MS to make it work properly.

I had a USB stick that failed also recently, but the failed component fell off, and was resoldered in, and it works again, so anything is possible.

 

[AronSearle]

A Pentium D dual core 3400, or Athlon 2800? on Windows 7

Pretty much the same as each other, both will run windows 7, but are dated, so don't expect much. you will get good basic funciontallity from it, it will struggle if you start streaming HD movies and running other programmes at the same time.

2gb of memory is also not that great, and will cause more loading times.

It is either recognised, or not, or I can access data or not, depending on I suppose the temperature in the room?

Can you explain this in more detail?

Does it work for awhile and then stop?

Hard drives are comparatively resistant to heat, they normally won't overheat in a domestic PC. If the case is running hot, I would expect other parts to overheat and shut down before the hard drive.

Fixing hard drives is generally not practical, get the data from it, dump it.

 

[diyer56]

If it were me I would copy the data onto a new/working disk when the faulty disk is operating normally. If you care about the data it's worth the price of a disk. Your intermittent problem is likely to get worse.

edit: too slow

 

[JRRTolkien]

Just to confirm, as requested, the hdd either is recognised at boot up, or ignored (guessing it doesn't spin up quickly enough or power not getting to electronics for compy to recognise) - if it didn't spin up quick enough, would think compy see's that hdisk is there, but unusable, but it just doesn't show. Or does! lol.

So maybe if I preheated, or cooled the hdisk, it might work to a state where I can get a proper backup off it, OR replace a potentially faulty component to make it work properly again.

The Pentium D 3400 seems to be dual core, whereas the Athlon 2800 is single, so one would presume the Pentium is 6800, therefore double speed, or in the world of computers logic doesn't work..

diyer56, I managed to get 'most' data off this disk, but some things said 'not allowed' and suchwith, but I hoard things, and like to keep order, and things working. In 10-20 years time, hard disks will not exists as such. Tills in most shops now use memory storage with a Linux based OS

 

[diyer56]

Not sure if this helps in the CPU battle...

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Pentium-D-945-vs-AMD-Athlon-2800

 

[CylonRaider]

If the HD is not spinning up quick enough at boot to be recognised then go into the BIOS and set a "wait state" of about 3 seconds.

You can also use a live Linux cd to extract data off the drive if need be but you might have to issue a force mount command if you have had to do a "Dirty Shutdown" in windows.