Woke up this morning to a blue screen of death. Tried a re-boot and the Bios kicks in, but the hard drive doesn’t sound like it spins up. The “Dell” screen is replaced by the message “Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility.” Setup utility options all look ok. I’ve opened the case to check and reseat all the power and data cables, nothing seems to work. I don’t have another desktop to install the suspect drive into, but I’m pretty certain the main drive is dead.
The sick machine is a Dell 8200 and originally came with Windows98. We upgraded to XP via a download years ago and I don’t have any install or boot cds. Is there anything I can do to boot the machine? There’s another harddrive in the machine, but all the operating system files are on the dead drive, right? I tried to boot from a floppy that had the Boot, NTDETECT, and ntldr files on it (this was suggested by a website), but that didn’t work either (same mesage comes up, and I did check that the boot order accesses the floppy drive first).
Any thoughts? Going out and buying a new drive won’t solve all the issues right? I’d still need to get XP loaded on the new drive somehow, right?
It does indeed sound like your drive is dead. If that is the case, your only option of recovering your files would be hiring a professional data recovery service.
If there is a chance that the hard drive might spin up again, try inserting a Linux Live CD into your computer. It’ll let you boot up the computer and attempt to access the failed hard drive, hopefully allowing you to copy important data onto a USB stick or some such device.
Open the case, put your ear right next to the drive, and listen to the drive. What do you hear? Nothing? (Interesting) Clicking? (Bad) Grinding? (Very bad).
The first thing to do would be to see if your bios actually recognizes that the HD with Windows is there. Go into the Bios and there should be a list of drives connected to the machine. See if your main HD is listed.
Not there? Check out the Ultimate Boot cd. I’m guessing you have access to another computer since you can post. You will need to download the UBC, and burn it to a disc. It contains a number of very useful programs, so you may want to grab this even if you fix the problem before you get to this point. Make sure you set your bios to boot from Cd first, otherwise you may just get a “NTLDR missing” message.
It will load a Windows “shell” from the cd, which lets you run specific diagnostic and testing programs. It’s not a full version of Windows, but it’ll let you get in and poke around. You should be able to go into My Computer and check your drives. If your HD is listed and you can browse it, your Windows may have gotten corrupted, and you may have to repair it.
Failing that, you may be able to install Windows on another hard drive, but that will require erasing the contents of the drive. I’m not sure if
Thanks for the replies. I wasn’t able to respond over the weekend due to my laptop power cable going on the fritz- when it rains it pours, I guess.
So the drive is very much dead, not recognized by BIOS. Unfortunately, this was the primary drive that contained the OS (Win XP), so I had the pleasure of reinstalling all the software and drivers as well as dealing with the drive. The drive itself won’t spin up- BUT I went out and bought an external enclosure (one of those little boxes that converts and internal drive into a USB external drive) and left it plugged in. After about 6 hours of doing nothing, I heard the drive spin up and was able to see the data for about 90 seconds. Then the drive sounded like it was decreasing in RPM and then it went silent again. So it sounds like it may be more circuit board (or drive motor?) related than an issue with the media. Not certain if this is good news or bad. Some websites have suggested putting the drive in the freezer overnight (on the theory that it may contract some metal parts that have cracked and re-establish a connection). I may try this as the outcome can’t be worse than my current situation.
I did have a backup program running (Memeo), but was shocked to learn that the last time it seems to have worked was January of 2008! This is despite the little box that pops up occasionally telling you “All backups are up to date!”… LIAR! So, if I can’t get the drive to work again it’ll be a years worth of pictures (quite a few actually) and financial records that will be lost. Moral of the story: Check you backups to be sure they are actually working. Arrgh!
Just a quick update in case anyone cares: I managed to get the drive working again.
After doing some research into my options for data recovery, I determined my “priceless” photos and memories actually DID have a price, and it was considerably less than the $1500 quoted by the data recovery specialists. So a little further research turns up some info that, most of the time, the circuit board is the root cause of the failure rather than the actual media or heads or motors. So the suggested fix is to find an identical drive and swap out the circuit board.
This is easier said then done, though, since you not only have to match up the model number, but also have to match up things like a DCM code, the circuit board number, and also need to make sure that the country of manfacture is the same and the drives were manufactured at around the same time to ensure the firmware versions will be the same. A bit of a challenge for disk that came out of an 8 year old Dell. Luckily there are firms that specialize in collecting old drives out of outdated corporate machines and I found a close match from a supplier in California (that charged me $135 for an 80G drive, about twice what you’d pay for a new drive of that size).
I swapped the circuit boards (not hard, just a few screws) and the old drive spun up and was fine. I quickly moved all the data to a new drive and all seems to be well. So I’d recommend trying this approach before giving up or sending your drive out to a ‘professional’ recovery service. Oh- prior to the circuit board swap, I did try putting the drive in the freezer overnight, but this had no effect.
Much the same thing happened to me. I ended up just removing the drive and putting in a new one. Lucky for me my HDD didn’t have anything valuable on it.