Windows 7 won't boot - RAW drive?!

slipd · 19 Jul 2013 at 23:18

Hi guys,

A really strange one; a machine I use probably once or twice a month decided not to boot today! After about 5 minutes of black screen I get a coded error (system hardware related) advising me if this is the first time I have seen this error to perform a repair from the Windows CD.

The Windows CD can't even find the installation? I've used a couple of live CDs and so far only UBCD4WIN lets me browse the drive in its normal NTFS state, most show the drive as unformatted (RAW) and when I took the drive out and put it in a different, working system, Windows saw the drive as unformatted too

Any ideas?

d_brennen · 19 Jul 2013 at 23:28

In my humble opinion, with the limited information you have presented, I declare this disk to be an ex-hard drive. Mount it in a live CD, extract anything important and replace at the earliest convenience. I'd be interested to see what the SMART status of the disk is, UBCD has a SMART reader iirc

this_is_gav · 20 Jul 2013 at 00:01

First of all, grab what you can from UBCD4WIN. Only once you've got the files you need you should start probing... but as above, it does sound like it's in the process of becoming a door-stop

lurkio · 20 Jul 2013 at 11:22

what brand of HD is it , hopefully not toshiba/hitachi

slipd · 20 Jul 2013 at 11:53

lurkio said:
what brand of HD is it , hopefully not toshiba/hitachi

It is a Hitachi as it goes

IDE, from 2009...

lurkio · 21 Jul 2013 at 01:44

damn , in my experience I replace about 4 x as many toshiba or hitachi drives than any other

d_brennen · 21 Jul 2013 at 01:52

lurkio said:
damn , in my experience I replace about 4 x as many toshiba or hitachi drives than any other

You don't see any Seagates then?

lurkio · 21 Jul 2013 at 13:02

western digital and seagates , are my prefered stocked drives

I wouldn't touch toshiba or hitachi with a barge pole.

seagates + WD + samsung x 4 = amount of toshiba/hitachis I replace
Don't get me wrong I do change the odd WD / seagate , but generally after 700 x 24hr of use.

KIA · 21 Jul 2013 at 18:38

http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/

jeffa123 · 22 Jul 2013 at 13:57

I still run a couple of Deskstar drives I purchased back in 2007-8 and have imaged reimaged and done just about every trick in the book apart from Raid them. Though AHCI is much the same because of the NCQ. I have had it running on the NVidia setups using the 650i initialisation. I can honestly say I have lost more Scuzzy drives due to bad Adaptec controllers than I have to motherboard hardware control protocols.
It is when you have dual controllers over one device that causes most of the issues with Hard drives. Look at the latest SATA controllers that are used by manufacturers on the motherboards. Sometimes using two different ones like Asus does on its latest ones and you immediately get a conflict in the Bios structure. Something that may work fine for one but cannot do a thing for another user.
I still have IDE hard drives that go back to 1997. One is an old Seagate Medallion 13GB. Nothing to write home about but it still works perfectly and is a brilliant OEM driver compound. And I often plug it in via USB when I am looking for old drivers that people have considered out of date. The old drivers keep their signature better.