Cannot access drive C:

Factual Questions
1

Twice in the past month my computer has given me that message, and taken 2 or 3 rebootings before running normally. During these times, the hard drive sounded like it wasn’t quite spinning with the same characteristic noise. Then it seemed to heal itself and do fine. Doing surface scans showed nothing of significance.

So, what’s the most likely problem, and how much time do I have before she locks up completely? and what do you think it will take to fix it? All the local places will take it out of service for at least a week to fix it, if not longer. I recognize the inevitability, and we’re not using it much at home, but I’d like some more info from computer-minded dopers before disconnecting it and dashing it off to the computer clinic.

And yes, I won’t substitute advice gotten here on SDMB for bona-fide computer medical care with a qualified computer doc.

Thanks,

QtM

2

Umm… could be several things, but mostly likely scenario if this non-booting behavior has just started happening lately is a misbehaving hard drive and potential incipient drive failure. Hard drives are cheap so the best solution is usually to get a new one.

1: Back everything up that’s important

2: Get the largest drive within reason your BIOS and OS can handle. You can get a 7200 RPM, 80 gig Western Digital from SAMS club for $ 100.00. 20, 40 and 60 gig drives are usually on sale at Staples for $60 - $90. Any major brand is fine.

3: Set the jumpers to master (old C: drive) and slave (new drive).

3: The new drive will come with a setup floppy that will let you copy the partition from your C: drive to the new drive. Then remove the old C: drive and replace it with the new drive.

4: You are done.

3

3a: Set new drive back to master.

4

Astro’s advice is exactly what I would order.

5

Hmm…Was the sound when it was acting up kinda like the muted plucking of a guitar string (ie, kinda like a “pop” noise with the tiniest smidgen of reverb?), rather than the normal clickety-clackety? If so, it could very well be that the head arm actuator - the thing that moves the heads back and forth across the drive platters - is about to go. It will probably become more and more frequent until you can boot to it again.

I don’t think it would be your BIOS, or drive cables, or anything like that - 85% of the time in my experience, if the system is booting up, getting past the POST, THEN getting the “Cannot access Drive C:” error while trying to load the operating system AND the drive is making strange noises, then the issue is usually hardware-related.

However, I can think of one other strong possibility - there is a bad segment of your hard drive where the operating system loading data is, and the noise is from the heads trying to read from that location numerous times because it’s not finding data where it thinks there should be data. One way to check is to use a hard-drive diagnostic utility. Scandisk that’s included with DOS/Windows works, and can find different things wrong if doing a surface (aka thorough in the Windows version) scan, but I would actually check the website of the hard drive maker - they have low-level utilities that often find things wrong that Scandisk or other 3rd-party disk utilities just can’t, and can tell you whether the issue is recoverable (ie, re-format the drive, marking those sections as bad), or if the drive is toast.
As I think about it, I am leaning strongly to the second issue. Usually if it’s showing “Cannot access Drive C:”, then that means at least part of the OS kernel has loaded, and is hitting a failing spot when it gets to a certain point in the OS load sequence. If the heads themselves were failing you’d usually get an “Operating System not Found” error. And most of the time I saw other hardware issues (IDE controllers going bad, bad cables, BIOS issues) you would get “Non-System Disk or Disk Error” with no floppy disk in the floppy drive.

A week to fix it? Are they that backed up? If it is a failing drive, it shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to fix it. Easy to do at home, too - I would just go out, get a new drive, a copy of Norton Ghost personal edition, hook up the new drive, ghost the data off your old drive to the new one, and just use the old one as non-critical data storage until it goes “poof”. And I highly suspect that’s what any repair shop would do anyway - at least that’s what I would do if I ran a repair shop.

Hope this all helps!
critter42

6

It is with great sadness that I must say I fear that doing it myself is now outside of my comfort zone. This from a former command line warrier (private 3rd class) who installed my own 2400 baud modem, RAM expansion board to boost my RAM all the way up to 1.6 megs, 8-bit sound card, and 2x CD ROM drive! How sad! But my daugher, before she went off to college, did so much jury-rigging and partitioning and general futzing that I just don’t understand the internal architecture anymore.

So tonight it’s off to a computer shop who says they can handle it in two days.

7

Ah, just get another computer, they are cheap these days…ALl you have to do is plug them in. You can even plug them into the old computer pretty easily to get your old data files.

Think about that, of course here is one deal:
“Gateway has their 300S Value desktop Celeron 2Ghz 128MB DDR/40GB Free 40x CDRW upgrade $499 - $100 rebate - $50 off coupon code: FIN50 + $54 shipping = $403”