Thanks, scabpicker (I like that name, by the way), as well as Mangetout and Shagnasty.
I only have a 256MB Jump Drive and the Yamaha burner I installed years ago went out ages ago. Given that most of my good data is on the F Drive (the second/newer, presumably okay drive) would it be okay to remove this drive completely before I restart the machine? I added it about a year ago as a slave drive, which was a piece of cake. I started saving/moving stuff over there last year, so that’s really the drive I’m concerned about, whether I have to dump the existing machine and get something new or not.
Or I do have this program called Intellmover, which connects via USB between two systems and transfers data straight from one machine to the other. If I got something new, perhaps this would work? (assuming it does boot up later today, or ever again).
Defrag time. If you are down to less than a gig you are probably having to scatter pieces of files all over to find room. Any major temp files or heavy paging file use could cause all manner of weirdness, sluggish performance, etc.
You will also start to see things like master file table fragmentation which slows things down even more. You will end up putting regular defrag back afterwards but the trial version of diskeeper 10 will happily chew through even some horrific drive fragmentation. Befoer you start the defrag, move everything you can to the other drive, if you have lots of room on the other drive you might want to try giving it a large page file (like a couple gigs) on the second drive temporarily to give the defrag program more breathing room for working with large files.
Usually not too long, about 20 minutes or so. Until it is cool to the touch, but not where water will condense on it when you pull it out. DFW is usually pretty humid, so this temp is still fairly warm. You would not want to drink a coke that is this temperature unless you are from Europe. I honestly do not know enough about electronics to answer the second question. But I do know that it is not uncommon for a machine that is having temp problems to run for hours before it spontaneously reboots. My guess is, the heat may have caused a fracture that is enough for the a transistor in a chip to leak somewhere. Cooling it down may close the gap, making it work until it gets hot again. I have not seen, but heard stories about drives that were completely recovered in increments. Get data off it for 20 minutes, then it would start to fail, put it back in the fridge and repeat. You could do the same without the fridge, but it would take longer, and our customers are usually screaming that their server is down (they should have paid for a RAID if it was that important). It does not always work, but it is always worth a try.
I dunno, though. Drives do funny things. We had a failed drive that three people had tried to recover data off of. None of us could get more than half their user data, but the customer continually complained about it. He did not understand how it could just be gone. The drive sat in a closet for a week, no one wanted to try again. Today, it finally could not be ignored any longer. Someone had to either close the ticket without trying again, or give it one last try. They got about 80% of it this time.
Oh, and if you have a motherboard lying around based on the intel 845 chipsets, I have seen them recover all the data off of a drive that a 915 based board could not even detect in the bios. I have no idea why this chipset has this ability, but we have had great success with it.
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It shoud be. You can usually yank a drive out, as long as:
You are not running any drive management software that makes a partition span drives. I cannot help you identify wether you have this or not. In Linux this would be called LVM. I think that it is called dynamic partitioning in Windows, but I could be completely wrong. I have not used Windows in years.
There are no system files on the disk you are removing. (Probably not, but people do things…)
The drive is not part of a RAID that is already degraded. ( I know this is not your case, but I am thinking maybe someone will read this later)
I’m not familiar with intellimover, but it looks like it would do what you wanted. But, If you know what files you want to move, and if that 180gig drive has a lot of data on it, it would be much faster to just move the drive. Plus, you could just leave the drive in the new box, and benefit from the extra storage, and possibly redundancy if you did make it into a RAID. (I do not know if this is possible without buying an extra card in XP, you could do it through drive management in 2000, I believe.)
And thanks, you gots an interesting name, too.
I get to try to recover data off of my mother’s hard drive this weekend. Wish me luck.
Oh and it is not defrag time. No defragging until you are sure the drive is good. It could be the mechanisim that spins the platters or moves the head is bad, more wear and tear isn’t what your drive needs. It might make your system faster, but it is not what you want to do until you have your data at least backed up on the 180gig drive.
As scabpicker says, no - this would not be an acceptable backup strategy for critical data. However, the needs and resources of the home user sometimes make compromises necessary or acceptable.
I would move the data onto the other hard drive, then physically remove it from the machine and check that it is all there safely by installing the drive in a different PC (perhaps here taking the opportunity to back it up onto something else as well). I would not leave the working drive in the machine, because if it’s the drive controller that is on the way out, the data could end up getting corrupted later or worse, a faulty drive controller could kill the drive or at least render it unrecoverable.
Well, it booted up again last night, but barely (perhaps, as Scabpicker mentioned, as it’s been cooled off). I can hardly make out what’s on the monitor without squinting, although the working speed appeared to be back to normal. Anyway, I did attempt a defrag on Drive C but was prompted not to continue, as there was not at least 15% of free space on the drive (there was only 8%).
I was able to safely move practically everything I want to keep over to Drive F. Tonight I’ll carefully remove the drive, giving me more freedom to take risky action against the C drive and it’s problems (such as this):
If you’ve got nothing in particular worth keeping remaining on the 40GB drive, I would suggest not bothering to try to repair it; wipe and do a clean install instead.
Before you do this though, make sure you download an antivirus program (AVG free is good) and a firewall (Sygate Personal Firewall or Zonealarm) and copy the installers for these to a CD or other external media; that way you can go all the way through the installation (including installation of the firewall) with the computer disconnected from the network and you will not expose it to unpatched vulnerabilities during the first few minutes of running (which is all it takes to get attacked in some cases).
Oh, and make sure you have the install media and license keys for any applications you want to put back again afterwards, also any driver disks for your hardware.
One other thing: If you are having trouble seeing what it on the screen, is it because the screen is blurry, or is it that the images have a lot of digital corruption? If it is the latter, it could be that the motherboard itself it going. This is the sign of a failing video card, and I have not seen a dell without the video being on the motherboard, unless it was custom built, or the video card was added later.
If your video card is a separate card from the motherboard, while you are in there getting the drive out, take out the video card an put it back in. I have seen re-seating cards fix plenty of odd behaviour.
Oh, and be sure to touch an unpainted part of the metal case before you slide the drive out, to guard against static electricity. If you have a anti-static writsband, they are nice, but touching the case will get you by, usually.
