Why, God?

sjt269

sjt269

sjt269

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11 Dec 2004
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Directly copied and pasted from my post on another forum (cba typing it out the same again):


First of all, excuse the typing errors, this isn't my PC, and the keyboard is rubbish.



Well, I've been putting off getting a new hard drive and sorting through my old one for a few weeks now, never had the money to spare. Looks like God has a sense of humour; he's just killed my hard drive. An 80Gb IBM Deskstar that's been with me for about 3 years has just failed to work.

I was playing KOTOR earlier fine, then it suddenly froze during a level load. I'd been hearing some wierd whirring noises from the PC for a few days, and I thought nothing of it (I thought it was the CD drive, it's pretty temperamental). I go back to turn it on about an hour ago, and it asks me for a system disk. Things started to go wrong at this point...

The long and the short of it is that the PC can no longer see the Deskstar HDD; it doesn't pick it up during POST, in the BIOS, or in the Windows Setup. It's connected fine, to the right cables, but all it does is whir menacingly when the PC tries to access it. It works up to a point with another old 10Gb HDD (shows up in the BIOS and everything), but within the last 20 minutes or so, it's stopped reading the Windows setup disk with that HDD, so I can't get any further.

I think it's dead, but I feel the need to try everything humanly possible to retrieve the data or repair the HDD before I consign it to the scrapyard in the sky. As you can imagine, over 3 years, it has a lot of files on it that are important to me, though not vital to the survival of the human race or anything so serious as that. I'd like them back though.


So...any ideas, no matter how remote the possibility of the PC working again is?


Thanks
tTz


PS: This keyboard sucks.
 
try to find another drive the same as that one (working) and take the card off the bottom of it, replace the one on your dead drive with that,

this MAY fix it, but its a maybe!
 
VeNT said:
try to find another drive the same as that one (working) and take the card off the bottom of it, replace the one on your dead drive with that,

this MAY fix it, but its a maybe!
Click to expand...
Quoted this as this often works - unless the head/platters are damaged.
 
Zefan said:
The new Deskstars are the best drives you can buy, so stop discouraging people from buying an extremely good product.
Click to expand...

This man telleth the truth! I've used 3 Hitachi drives in recent builds. All noticably quicker, quieter and cheaper than my Maxtor.
 
agw_01 said:
This man telleth the truth! I've used 3 Hitachi drives in recent builds. All noticably quicker, quieter and cheaper than my Maxtor.
Click to expand...

See see :p They've actually fixed the problem with the "Deathstars" and have stated it in their specifications for their drives.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
IBM DeathStar Strikes again. only a complete noob or a fool would buy a IBM/Hitachi drive. why bother with them, just go for a seagate or a western digital. :confused:
Click to expand...
Mav, if you don't know what you are talking about, please do not mislead others. Wow, one hitachi drive has failed... (sorry, OP) but that doesn't make them bad drives. IBM are NOT Hitachi - Hitachi took over from IBM who just gave up. Anyone who suggests Hitachi are in any way bad is not well endowed with HDU knowlegde and should perhaps look to storagereview.com for guidance.

Htachi are one of the best makes - not the best, as this remains Seagate - but one of, along with WD - though WD's standards have recently dropped somewhat.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
IBM DeathStar Strikes again. only a complete noob or a fool would buy a IBM/Hitachi drive. why bother with them, just go for a seagate or a western digital. :confused:
Click to expand...
More to the point, only a complete n00b would still swear by yesterday's news.

We could easily flame each computer manufacturing company - quite simple because most of them have made mistakes which have put people off them.
 
VeNT said:
try to find another drive the same as that one (working) and take the card off the bottom of it, replace the one on your dead drive with that,

this MAY fix it, but its a maybe!
Click to expand...


Does it have to be the same type of drive? (perhaps a stupid question, but I'm clutching at straws here) :confused:

I have two old 10Gb drives lying about the house, and I wouldn't mind sacraficing them if I could try to retrieve some data, even if it would only work long enough for me to copy some files onto CD before it gave up again.

Thanks for the link to the other thread, but I'm not sure that would work. The guy in the thread lost a partition, while it looks like my HDD has mechanically stopped working. Annoying would be an understatement. :(



:edit:

Also, I didn't have the opportunity to search or read any other threads last night, as my broadband connection died a silent death as well, and has only just come back to life. Took me half an hour to post this thread last night (not including typing the message) because of it. :o

:edit2:

Spoke too soon, connection randomly going again. It's really not my day/week/month. :(
 
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It does indeed have to be the same drive as the firmware needs to be compatible and all drives will have different parameters/specs so if you could pick up a working controller board from another dead drive (through platter death), then you might salvage it.
 
i had this with a samsung drive. even bought another one that was exactly the same but even with the new controller board it wouldnt pick up the drive. the old controller board worked with the new drive tho so something internal must have gone ape in there

as far as todays drives go, i used to stay away from IBm etc but have a 250gig hitachi now that runs cool. quiet and fast. the only total drive failures i;ve had are that 160gig samsung drive, and recently a 300gig seagate. that one just stopped working in windows. write errors and dissapeared completely on reboot :(

personally, i havent been too impressed with seagate. have used loads of diff drives and dont 'feel' anything different about their drives from other manuf's.

now i plan to stay with maxtor, hitachi and WD. no failures with any of them - well one 30 gig WD drive thats been reading and writing at about 4meg/sec for 4ish years, clunks, bangs and screeches like a banshee and freezes for minutes at a time. thing is tho - no bad sectors at all. it just wont die! that's a kind of drive failure i can live with ;)
 
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