I'm still in shock (posibble HDD failure) - PLEASE HELP!

[PaulMTC]

Went to bed last night with my PC working OK and ON.

Got up this morning and it was OFF.

Switched it on and almost immediately a little tune is played followed by a scratching noise and then it switches off.

I have two drives - a sata and an IDE. The sata is my master and boots off this first. After the scratching noise it tries to boot off off my second drive (IDE one).

To try and narrow things down, I took the power lead out of the main sata drive and when I reboot - the pc does NOT make the little tune and scratching noise and goes straight to try and boot off the IDE drive (as I'd expect).

PLEASE tell me there is something I can try to fix this!

As I said I'm still in shock while typing this.

Paul.

 

[megatron]

Reinstall your operating system on your ide drive. The best way to reinstall is on a partition, since u can format this, and if u only keep operating system and program files on this partition u wont lose data. If u havent partitioned the drive there is an option to "leave file system in tact" but I havent used this so I cant say if u lose data already there.

I would say u need to rma ** sata hard drive, sounds like a gonner; hopefully u backed it up if u have files on it u wanted to keep.

 

[InQ]

Is the SATA drive recognised by the BIOS?
Have you tried another power supply plug (on a different lead from the PSU completely)?

Although it does sound like its died..

 

[MAllen]

You could use your XP CD to boot to the recovery console. This will at least allow you to try and "look" at the drive to see if there are any files on there.

OR: find the manufacturer of your SATA Hard Disk and goto their website. You can then download a diagnositcs floppy (sometimes isos available). You can use this to boot your PC and test the state of your sick drive.

Note what InQ said - do you see the drive listed by the BIOS? If no... then start preparing for the worst...

Crunching noises from hard drives are never good.... though this is the normal way for most people to learn about backups....