Last night our PC decided to pack up. It looks like its the hard-drive. Anyway, when I spoke to Gary, he informed me that not only had the work PC done the same, but also his friends PC!! So thats 3 totally independant PC's, where we all know each other all with HD failure on the same day!!

Anyway, we have plugged the HD's onto a known PC to try and lift the files off them and got the following results.....

Gary's HD - Totally fooked. Makes all kinds of odd noises.

Gary's Friends HD - Success, all files accessed.

Our HD - I can browse parts of it. I can see all the Program files, all of the Windows folder and all of one of the User sections (including sub-folders). I can't open the 'HP_Owner' folder to get to our desktop files though, which is where the main stuff is that I need. However, when I look at the properties of the drive, it has the expected capacity (181gb Total, 61.6gb free), which must mean that it can see the files, but I cannot access them.

The only thing I can suggest is that perhaps because we have to enter a password at the Windows login screen that it won't let me browse the folder? Is there a way through this? Or is there some software that will let me browse the entire HD?

It is devastating because that HD contains all the photos of our bungalow renovation, holidays, weddings and many other things that are not replacable. I know we should have backed them up, but stupidly didn't.

HELP!!! <<<Real tears.....

 

THIS IS SCARY !!!

A customer of mine had a hard drive failure last night/this morning.

I'm in the process of recovering the machine now.

What is going on ?

Power problems ?

 

I was wondering if it is some kind of virus or something. Seems really odd.

The other tricky bit is that my Hewlett Packard PC didn't come with discs, I don't think. Not quite sure how that works.

At the moment, if I could only get these files off, I would be VERY happy.

 

There is a program. I will have to hunt it out. Which loads as a bootable CD.
All it does is run as a porgram which is a dos version of explorer.
Doesnt matter if your OS is poorly you can still get to the files.

By the way. What happens when you try to boot up your PC?

 

Norton Ghost might do it.

 

It brings up a window where you can chose to enter Safe Mode, revert to previous known settings, or Start Windows normally. Whatever you select it just restarts and does that in an eternal loop.

I am currently on Gary's PC by the way.

If it hadn't found anything, then I would have accepted defeat, but as I can 'see' the HD and some of it, I can't accept that its gone.

 

OK C Stop.
Ok. Is it windows XP? If so put in your windows XP disk, and boot from this.
Look at what the screen is saying when it comes up with press "R" to repair press it. It will load up repair console. and should give a prompt.
If your main Administrator account has a password you will need to enter this.

When a prompt is returns type CHKDSK /R

May take ages.
There could be an underlying issue ie bad ram/overheating CPU or HD going bad which is currupting data. Or all the porn you download has taken its toll.

 

Lee, I am fairly sure that I didn't get any discs. I will have to delve through my loft though to check.

If I was to be able to run the repair console, then is there much of a chance of losing everything?

 

No it should rebuild lost or curupt data needed to load the OS.
Have any of your mates got a windows XP Disk?

Is it a branded machine like HP? Dell. If so these may have some of there own utilities. If its HP/Packard Bell/Compaq/Advent give me the model number I may be able to help.

 

My friend had the same prob the other night, his pc kept restarting once the windows xp screen came up, all it needed was a chkdsk /r ran from the recovery console as stated above to let him in. It turned out to be a faulty stick of RAM. When you get in have a look at the event viewer which may point you in the right direction of what the problem is.

 

Christian,

The HP machines have a "secret" partition where the windows setup files are kept, instead of using CDs. If you format the whole drive you'll lose these.

When you power on the PC, you need to hold one of the F keys, I think it's F9 or F10 and this takes you into windows set up.

long time since I've messed with an HP machine so just going by memory.

HTH

 

take hd out and put it in a working machine as slave and recover data or use ERD commander and boot of cd.

people if you want keep your data please use RAID SATA raid 0+1 is cheap now.

HD fail they have moving bits which will fail over time.

or fucking back up DVD writers are cheap now

 

yes re reading your post if chkdisk does not work then you are fucked or you take it to a recovery place which will not be cheap as they have to take the platters out and try and read them

 

I have just done the 'chkdsk' thing, which took FOREVER!!

It is still saying 'Access is denied'

I have also tried from MSDOS and it says the same. It really strikes me as a password issue. I can't believe it would have lost such a specific part of the HD as one complete 'folder', but nothing else.

 

something on lines of this site may help you

http://www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/

if you google search the are some good pay for programs

 

so you password proected the file

ok right click on the file and go into secricty and take ower ship by going into advance and add everyone

if that does not work go into safe made and do the same it should work

 

Just bought a 320gig Seagate Barracuda Sata II disk for Ł68!

BUT only because my 250gig Maxtor Sata disk failed after 3 weeks. Not bulletproof.

 

but jay if one fails in raid 0+1 you don't lose any data

 

Thanks for your help guys. I ran chkdsk/r with the HD in Gary's machine, it took AGES. That didn't change its performance on that PC, so I was a little down about it. However, I brought it home and thought I would have one more go with it in our machine and after a little jiggery-pokery, it works!! For how long I don't know.

There is one common thing that made it crash. Both times that it has crashed seriously was as I accessed Windows Media Player. It freezes up and I have to hard-reset the PC. I haven't changed anything, so can't imagine that it is a software problem, but it got me wondering if it may be a problem with the RAM? Wouldn't explain why we had no joy accessing the drive from another machine, but that may have just been a separate security issue. What are the chances of that?

I actually bought a 250gb Samsung SATA drive yesterday for Ł60 from PC World. Is that the right thing? Or should I sling that back at them and get something else since it looks like I may have an extra day or two to play with? I have removed the important stuff, although I still have a further 80-100gb of Music etc to sort through.

What is this Raid thing I keep hearing about?

 

RAID IN short is backing up of a drive in one way or another. There are 5 types in total I think. The Raid we would use at home is Mirror Raid which makes an exact copy of one drive to another.

Media player crahing out could be RAM/CPU or Graphics card/chip.
But where PC's are concerned always go with a SW fault first, As this is the stuff which controls the HW.

 

FOOOOOOOK


one of my harddrives has just foking died.....





I cant fooking believe it

 

Remember mine came back from what looked like death. I plugged it into a working machine as a secondary drive and carried out a 'chkdsk/r', then brought it home and it has worked since. I know its not right and is going to get replaced this week, but at least I can get my stuff off it!

 

You log in as Administrator at whatever PC you connected this drive. Then you right click the folder you cannot access, you open Security tab and give yourself full scess. Job done. You might have to switch off "simple folder sharing" os something like that on that machine.


Common thing when browsing system folders on other machine.

 

someone i know had the same .. are you running norton or anything like that ???

first she knew of it was she couldn't access the net....

 

Not beeing able to access net suddlenly is typical troyan problem.

 

seems a bit too random all these HD's crashing out, everyone running and upto date virus checker?

 

Update...


I have lost 2 out of my 3 drives

the only one that works is m SATA wich luckily i put all my system stuff on..


but i have definately lost an 80gig and a 40 gig drive


NOOOOOOOOO


the pc wont even recognise they are there!!!

 

Data can still be recovered, even with complete mechanical failure of the drive. There are specialist companies that deal with that.

 

Thats true but they charge a premium for this sort of stuff, its around the 1K mark to recover an HDD.

 

1k ? hmm I think I'll start a business to get them sent over to Poland....

 

First link I found on the google:

http://www.odzyskiwaniedanych.net


lest then 30 quid for hard drive analysis, data recovery from ~50 quid for electronics failure up to 150+ for mechanical failure. Nothing about 1k up ....

 

....which is OK providing you have nothing to hide!!

Adam, you tried to plug your failed HD's into another machine?