Is this really the end of my hard drive?

[xcdtowg]

Hey,
We just turned Plonking's PC on and it made these funny noises and first thought it was a fan, but later we turned it on again and the noise was much worse, sounded like the hard drive was about to die, looked at the screen and it was unable to detect an IDE drive.

There are two hard drives, one with windows and one with linux, the windows being the master and full of work and important things!

The windows one seems fine, but the linux is pretty much screwed.

Is there anything we can do to save it??

Also in order to get rid of the linux boot loader (we have grub on there at the moment) do we just need to put in the xp cd and that "fixmbr" thing? If so what do we have to do?

Any ideas?

[Plonking]

lol yeah it's a real shame, i should have backed it up sooner, lol.. my main hope now is to get windows back, then i can go buy a new HDD and put a newer version of linux on there. looks like i have lost tonnes of work and stuff, but its my own fault for now backing up ... d'oh!

[Paul K]

Erm time to get a new drive and get everything backed up. You could do the fixmbr thing but if that fails I would boot from the XP cd and try a repair console session. If the drive is visible at all you can get the data off it but unless the BIOS or Windows can see the drive you are slightly buggered

[Plonking]

hehe ok i figured as much.. it was making noises the other day, and i thought 'hmm one of my fans are going'.. lol, couldn't have been more wrong, and, to top it all off, i bought a stack of 50 cds today with a view to replacing this busted drive once i had graduated.. there was a lot of stuff on that drive, mostly uni work and emails and stuff like that, but never mind.. i'll back everything up across the network (i'm in a live linux atm) and then try fixmbr.. which i havent had much luck with in the past, so am crossing my fingers

[Paul K]

n Windows XP, you can uninstall GRUB as follows:

Boot from the Windows XP CD and press the "R" key during the setup in order to start the Recovery Console. Select your Windows XP installation from the list and enter the administrator password. At the input prompt, enter the command "FIXMBR" and confirm the query with "y". The MBR will be rewritten and GRUB will be uninstalled. Press "exit" to reboot the computer.

[xcdtowg]

Erm ok were trying the fixmbr stuff from the xp disk and it asks for the administrator password after you press R. But the password from the admin account on that PC doesn't seem to be working
Is that the right password? We have tried upper and lower case and its not being mistyped.

Help!

EDIT- this is what happened http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;308402
just trying this now

[Paul K]

Nope it would be the MAIN administrator password that was set when XP was installed

[xcdtowg]

hmm we didnt install it, the shop that made it installed it that would be why...

[Paul K]

Try leaving it blank then, sometimes they don't put a password on during a shop install.

[xcdtowg]

Originally Posted by Paul

Try leaving it blank then, sometimes they don't put a password on during a shop install.

Y'know that was an amazing idea!
we didnt think of that but it worked!

moment of truth now just rebooting, argh

EDIT - IT WORKED! Wooooo! Thank you!!!

[Paul K]

Originally Posted by xcdtowg

Y'know that was an amazing idea!
we didnt think of that but it worked!

moment of truth now just rebooting, argh

EDIT - IT WORKED! Wooooo! Thank you!!!

See I'm useful for some things Have fun sorting out that hard drive

[Plonking]

hurray, i have windows back

lost so much stuff, and now tomorrow im off to buy a 250gb drive and i'll get a new version of linux too.

hurray!

thanks!

P

[bmxbandit]

if the linux drive is still not recognised by the bios, and there's some really important data on it you colud always try The Freezer Trickââ€Æ¦Ã‚¾Ãƒâ€šÃ‚¢.

or, just take it apart and play with the magnets

[Raistlin]

Originally Posted by Plonking

hurray, i have windows back

lost so much stuff, and now tomorrow im off to buy a 250gb drive and i'll get a new version of linux too.

hurray!

thanks!

P

How much were you thinking about paying for that drive?

[Paul K]

Originally Posted by Plonking

hurray, i have windows back

lost so much stuff, and now tomorrow im off to buy a 250gb drive and i'll get a new version of linux too.

hurray!

thanks!

P

What drive did you lose stuff from? At least you have got a working PC again, better than the alternative I suppose