Physical hard drive failure.
 

Hi all,

This is typical bad luck but hopeing for an easy solution.

Last night my i spent 2 1/2 hours building and loading xp onto my parents new (yet second hand) pc and abit of software tonight (line 6 monkey, iTunes, Jamvox all stuff like that) and just as i finish with everything i give it one last reboot and just to do something easy to test it I go to ebay.co.uk and boom Black screen then POST :mad:

It then says hard disk failure, press f1 to continue...

BTW it has 3 ide HD's, so it looks for windows on the slave but it aint there so i have to restart (Ctrl,Alt & Del) then windows loads again fine but only for about 5 mins before it does it again...only done it twice (i thought i'd ask for help before trying anything).

If the disk is knackerd..can i some how duplicate the HD to one of the others so i dont have to go through all that again ?

If it helps i am confident it will load up windows again but maybe only for 5 - 10 minutes..

Any help will be great, Thanks.

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

Have you installed all the latest drivers. Have you tried starting up in safe mode. I had a similar issue but with Win 7 where it would boot and then suddenly shutdown. It worked perfectly in Safe Mode. CPU Temps + Watts were fine, Turns out I needed to update the BIOS and it worked ever since.

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

ah, it might be drivers as it was installing drivers for my dads jamvox (guitar thing) when i noticed it went funny..it said it was sucsessful but keep't the copying screen there for ages after and pc went really slow and took a long time to do everything (sorry should have put this in my first post, just was'nt thinking).

I read in quite a few places to put into the freezer so thats where it is now, not sure if it will achive anything but seemed like a good excuse to get out of it for the rest of the evening :) but thanks i will look into that tomorrow, i am hopeing i dont have to go through it all again...

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

Have you checked the drive for any bad sectors?

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

Check all the cable connections mate and unplug the other Hard drives.
What does it say in POST? Any indication as to the Hard drive itself?

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

Unfortunately, if it's giving you the hard disk failure at boot up then you are in trouble. Chances of it staying stable for any lenght of time to extract information from it is low.

IDE Hard drives are now going to be quite old, and relatively low capacity. SATA was already taking over some five years ago. A replacement IDE connector disk could be a challenge.

Are there any checker utilities available from the drive manufacturer you can download, and brun to a CD boot disk you can then run? You can also try setting a chkdsk option. Perhaps you can beeot to safe mode or command prompt instead of the full windows?

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

nah i hav'nt, not sure if it will keep windows loaded for long enough...can i do this without windows?


when i took it out the cable's seemed fine but i will go over them properly when i put it back it.

If i was to start it now it would probably load without saying anything about it, but when it crashes and try's to reboot it just says hard disk failure, press f1 to continue and that's all ?

it is an old pc i'm guessin the psu maybe about 10yrs old ! i do have a spare 300w but it would mean losing 100w as it's 400w.

---------- Post added at 23:42 ---------- Previous post was at 23:23 ----------

i was thinking this but, guess i was just willing to try anything but sitting there again...

yh, i was thinking that it was old and tbh the stuff i was putting on there for um they probably wouldnt use..the thought's were there but that wouldve been it, it wouldve been mainly an internet comp after about a week once the novelty wouldve worn off :) i was just hopeing it wouldve lasted longer than one night !!!

pass, i'm not sure...i think it may have been a barracuda, not sure but will look into it and see what i can find.

Thanks everyone for your inputs aswell :tu:

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

Freezer trick is only useful where the bearings are sticky. If the disk spins up alright then you're wasting your time.

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

like i say it was mainly just an excuse, i'm gunna try a few things tomorrow but nothing overkill..i dont wanna mess with it for 3 hours then find i have to reload windows onto a different disk again, if i cant get it sorted fairly quickly i'll probably just bin it and they'll just have to have 40gb less.

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

It's also handy for dry joints on the main board... Brings back memories running recovery software on a HDD in a freezer with a long power and IDE cable running from a PC sat on top :D

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

And there`s me thinking i was the only one who had done that!:D

Re: Physical hard drive failure.
 

Rolled back the drivers or done a system restore?