Menu
What's new
Find's Treasure Forums

Welcome to Find's Treasure Forums, Guests!

You are viewing this forums as a guest which limits you to read only status.

Only registered members may post stories, questions, classifieds, reply to other posts, contact other members using built in messaging and use many other features found on these forums.

Why not register and join us today? It's free! (We don't share your email addresses with anyone.) We keep email addresses of our users to protect them and others from bad people posting things they shouldn't.

Click here to register!

Need Support Help?

Cannot log in?, click here to have new password emailed to you

Changed email? Forgot to update your account with new email address? Need assistance with something else?, click here to go to Find's Support Form and fill out the form.

PC problems and procrastination

F

fongu

Well-known member
I lost my hard drive on my personal computer about 5-6 weeks ago and have not replaced it yet. I was trying to find some way to save my hard drive information. 4 albums consisting of 900 photos and videos are at stake and a lot of reference work also. So, for those of you who procrastinate and don't back up your hard drive, this could be happening to you. My older brother and I planned to start a procrastinator's club last year, but we put it off.
Lots of photos of coins and other finds that I never figured out how to post and I broke my digital camera several months ago and have not replaced it yet, either. I don't know if I'm like a bull in a china shop or just plain discouraged, but I got to do better with this technology. Don't let this happen to you.
 
It depends what happened to your old drive. If you just can't boot to it...you can still recover the files. If the drive itself won't respond at all you have to send the drive out to have the files recovered...which is very expensive. What is saying when you try to boot it?
 
I do "feel your pain" as this has happened to me a few times. I know there are items available to set up a second or back up hard drive but when you are on a budget you can't always run out and buy these things. I have noticed that lately the price of flash drives have come down quite a bit so for myself I have been using them for pictures, music, etc......I wish you luck in recovering your lost info.
 
It was just saying disk read error and would not finish the post, then I got creative and changed the HD from auto to manual and now I can't get into the BIOS or anything. I have another barebones pc kit to assemble and hope with some luck to recover the data next week. A guy from a pc magazine told me how to do it, but some of the stuff is way over my head. I'm just a country boy. Win, lose or draw, I will do backups from now on, you can bet on it. Lesson learned and don't mess with stuff you don't know much of anything about.
 
Here's a trick with a defunct harddrive that I read about and tried. It actually works. A harddrive refused to spin up, which meant that some of the discs were making contact. Heres' the tip:

Remove the harddrive from the computer and seal it in a ziplock bag. Place it in the freezer for at least 24 hours. Have everything ready with the computer....opened up and with cables located. Take it out of the freezer and leave it in the ziplock bag, open the bag up and connect the cables. Boot up the computer. I tried this and the harddrive worked for about 7 minutes...just long enough for me to retreive critical files that I needed.

The thumb drives are really cheap these days and while they won't last forever, you only need it to last a couple days longer than your harddrive. Good luck

MrGee
 
When bios is telling you it can't read the disk that's bad news...I don't think I've ever been able to recover a disk that can't be seen by the bios.

I've had several people tell me about the freezer trick but I never had any luck with it. Good luck trying to get that data maybe you will catch a lucky break.
 
Buy a replacement hard drive, install your present operating system on it. Make this hard drive the "Master" by following the instructions on the manufacturers web site.
Make your bad hard drive the "Slave" by setting it's jumper to slave according to the information on the manufacturers website. Your hard drive data cable has two connectors, usually.
Although the "Master" will work in either position, it is recommended that the master drive be attached to the connector at the very end of the IDE ribbon cable. Then, a jumper on the back of the drive next to the IDE connector must be set in the correct position to identify the drive as the master drive. The slave drive must have either the master jumper removed or a special slave jumper set, depending on the drive. Also, the slave drive is attached to the connector near the middle of the IDE ribbon cable. If you still have problems go into Bios to enable it. If all this fails, do a Google search for "Can't see my 2nd drive" for more info.

Go to this link for Master Slave info: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/ide4.htm

Move your files off the old drive and onto the new drive.

Happy Hunting!
 
The old hard drive is IDE and the new unit I have not put together yet is SATA. But there is a cable for either hard drive, so I hope I can mix the master/slave and save the information. If not, I will try to find an IDE hard drive. When it started acting up, I should have made a back up copy on my flash drive, but I didn't. Thanks for all the advice and I hope I can get back to running from home instead of going to the public library.
 
I still haven't fixed my pc and restored my info, but when I came to the public library today they were selling old Dell pc towers from a recent upgrade and now I have a dell tower with windows xp and will set it up today or tomorrow and be back online even with dial up. For $20.00 for a used pc tower and being able to work from home versus a 20 mile round-trip to the library makes me happier.
 
fongu said:
The old hard drive is IDE and the new unit I have not put together yet is SATA. But there is a cable for either hard drive, so I hope I can mix the master/slave and save the information. If not, I will try to find an IDE hard drive. When it started acting up, I should have made a back up copy on my flash drive, but I didn't. Thanks for all the advice and I hope I can get back to running from home instead of going to the public library.
Click to expand...

Not sure if your aware, Sata Drive will need extra Sata drivers installed via slip streamed WINDOWS XP install disc. Otherwise it will go thru the process of installing and not complete as you get towards the end. Dells are kind of tricky as well, blame it on Dell and it's special drivers as well as needing to be installed in order. Go to Dells website and and type in the service tag number.
You'll also want to download onto your jump drive and run from your jump drive Belrac Advisor http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html to find out exactly what's on your machine. It's the best way to determine the correct drivers needed. I'm sure the library did not give you the Dell disc that is generally needed. I got sick of working on Dell machines.
 
I had a few HD crashes recently on a couple of different machines (wife's at home, mine at work); I got a kit from the computer store that connects the HD to a USB port; just pulled the old HD out and connected it to the new PC. Was not able to get everything, but sure did get a lot. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary...

Hind sight now, but you can also get a terabyte drive (got mine from Walmart) for a little over a hundred bucks that will completely back up your HD. It may take a day the first time (literally.)

I figured too, if I can recover the information, someone else can also, so I take the drives apart before recycling them. There are some very powerful little magnets in those things. Just say'n...

John
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top