On Saturday morning, I woke to find my computer had shut itself off during the night. The GFCI on the wall socket must’ve had a surge as it engaged itself and in the process fried my hard drive. Why the power strip didn’t help is beyond me.
I pushed the start button and my XP loaded and all looked normal. When it booted fully I had no peripheral input. I couldn’t mouse or type anything, it didn’t even recognize the ctrl/alt/del.
I took it to a repair shop and the guy said the drive was prolly bad, so I had him replace it and stick in the old one as a slave. On my old drive, there are only three folders I consider imperative. I want to restore those folders. If I navigate to the slave drive I get a message telling me that it is unformatted. I don’t want to reformat, since I want those three folders.
If I unplug the master cable and plug it into the slave and boot, I see my old desktop and all would appear to be intact, except I still can’t navigate anywhere. I bought three different mice (meece) and keyboards; none of them would register anything. The drive letter assignment seems to be random, as when I look for it in My Computer sometimes it’s an H, sometimes an F. Right now, I can’t see it at all.
The computer guy said I could bring him the drive and he could spend some time trying to recover the files, but couldn’t promise anything.
What, my computer geek cyber-friends would you suggest? My three needed files are digital photos, music and a misc catch all folder. The music and misc files are on the desktop, the photos are in my Shared Documents.
Any help? Any ideas? Do you think the computer guy might be successful? It’s worth $100 to me to get those photos and songs back. Somebody local to Hayward wanna come and make a hundred bucks? I NEED those files! All my boys’ baby pictures, irreplacable - idiot me of course didn’t do regular backups.
There’s a couple options. The first thing you’ll want is an external enclosure for your drive. This will allow you to simply plug it into your USB port and view everything. Borrow one from a friend or buy one… I see them online all the time for less than $20.
Plug it in… if you can see the drive, grab the files and call it a day.
If the drive spins up but the files are corrupt, you’ll need to buy some data recovery software to see if you can recover the files from the crashed/corrupt drive.
If the drive doesn’t even spin up, then it’s time for desperate measures. Take the drive, stick it in a ziplock baggy, and put it in your freezer for a while. Let it get nice and cold. Then take it out, quickly plug it into your enclosure, and see if it’ll operate long enough to grab your files. This is one of those desperate techniques, but it sometimes works.
If it doesn’t, however, it’s time to send the drive to specialists. It may cost $100, or it may cost substantially more.
Good luck man, and BACK UP! I hope you’ve learned your lesson!
Note that a GFCI isn’t a surge protector; its job is to interrupt power when a ground fault it detected. This protects people but doesn’t do much for computers.
If the computer booted successfully it suggests that the hard disc drive is still functional.
Wasson’s suggestion of an external hard drive enclosure is a good one. If that doesn’t work, I’ll note that I had good luck with the tech support department at my local Best Buy - they recovered most of the data on an otherwise unreadable hard drive. YMMV.
Probably the best way to do these is with an external hard drive.
I had good luck with a fried Maxtor drive by buying a used one of the same model on eBay and swapping out the circuit boards. If a power surge has fried the board this may help. I got back most of my files with no problem, but had to use recovery software to retrieve some corrupted ones.
As an IT person (but not quite that kind), I am confused as shit. If your computer booted up before and you can still see some things while poking around, your hard drive isn’t bad. Those types of failures aren’t that selective although a slow hard-drive death can take out the odd file. It wouldn’t work at all if you got fried in that way.
You likely have other computer problems but you need to find another computer guy. An external enclosure is a good idea but putting it in another computer would likely work as well.
Most likely, you got some fried USB ports on the motherboard (that control the keyboard and mouse). Don’t listen to Mr. Fix-it in all seriousness. That is a crap diagnosis.
Yeah, this is pretty confusing. Why would all be normal after a new drive and reinstall of XP if the ports were bad? The drive works, it boots the computer up but I just can’t navigate to anything via mouse or keyboard.
It’s good to hear that some of you folks have been successful. I will continue to tinker and perhaps hit my Best Buy. I’ve got $6 in Best Buy bucks!
It might be a software problem that you coincidentally assumed was a hardware issue. Try booting into Safe Mode (F8 at startup) with your old drive. That will give you a set of default drivers and may just work.
My money’s on a fried motherboard - specifically the USB ports.
I’m more concerned about the GFI tripping - unless your PC’s in the bathroom, why is it plugged into a GFI in the first place? Second place - what happened to make it trip? It is possible that the receptacle’s just gone wonky and decided to trip for no real good reason, but it’s also possible that there’s a problem with the power strip or the PC itself.
Grossly (and it’s an admittedly incorrect metaphor) simplified, a GFI will trip if it senses 120 volts going out to whatever’s plugged into it, and only 119 volts come back, meaning 1 volt is out wandering and found another way home. The design concept is that it assumes that stray volt is going through a person rather than a wire, so it cuts the power so the person’s not injured. This does nothing to protect computers from damage.
As for doing backups, you’ve now got an extra drive. Just go to Frys and pick up an external enclosure and you’ll then have a nice backup drive, which can also be quite handy for moving large files around. (Want to get all of those baby photos onto Mom’s computer without burning 19 CDs?)
While you’re at it, start the disclipline of putting all of your files into the “My Documents” structure. This will make future backups a lot simpler.
Replace “volts” with “amps” (and maybe some more reasonable values for those units), and I’ll be happy. Specifically, the GFI will trip when it detects greater than a 5 milliamp difference.
Agreed. For this reason, I detest programs which want to default to some nonstandard saving location. Argh!
Yeah - if windows booted up, it’s probably not your hard drive, although some of the data on it could have become corrupted.
When you run it, does it get hot? Like, hotter than it should? I had this exact same problem with a hard drive (Maxtor) of mine that failed. For some reason it started overheating (more than usual, that is) and because of that not being read all the way by the computer. Fans did nothing.
I bought a new hard drive, and then to back everything up I did the freezer suggestion noted above (I had to do it a good three times before I got all of my data). Don’t do this, however, unless you ONLY want to save your data and don’t care about keeping the hard drive. Rapid cooling and heating can warp the drive surface, so it’s not going to be much use to you after you do it.
I’m all for checking out the external hard drive enclosure or swapping out the hard drive board. Also getting your motherboard checked out. And go to a different computer guy; do you have any friends in RL that know hardware and will take a look at it? I’ve noticed that if you’re paying for advice, there’s suddenly all kinds of expensive things wrong with it, whereas if I just ask my dad, it’s usually a simple matter of replacing a sound card or something.
