Problems With 2 Old Hard Drives!

[walterbieber]

I Have These Two Old Hard Drives That Dont Seem To Work. I Need You Computer Wizards To Tell Me If They Are Broken, Bad Or Can Be Fixed.


One Is A Western Digital WD Caviar 26400 With 6448.8 MB That When I Start Up My Computer It Says, Windows Could Not Load Properly And Gives Me A Bunch Of Start-Up Menus (Safe Mode, Normal, Exc.) That Don,t Even Work.



the Other Is A Conner CFS850A. Not Rally Much Information Is Known About It (MB or GB Type Exc.) But When The Computer Starts Up It Just Shows A Black Screen With A White Blinking Line, At The Top-Left Of The Screen.

[nevermind1534]

Is this when you boot from the drive? If that is the case, you might be able to just put them in another computer and pull your data off, or the problem could be more serious.

[The_Crippler]

Is this when you boot from the drive? If that is the case, you might be able to just put them in another computer and pull your data off, or the problem could be more serious.


This. Put them in another machine as a slave and see if you can recognize once booted. Make sure that if it's on the same IDE cable as the primary that you set the jumper to "slave."

[phen0m]

Do you try to boot from them? If so, do they have the data on them needed to boot?

[nevermind1534]

a virus could have corrupted some windows files, but that can also happen by itself. It could also just be that the hard dries are shot.

[AMD Killa]

Well, if they click, then you are in trouble. Ahh, the infamous click of death. Happened to me once. Glad it did. It happened on my mum's partner's pc, and he wouldent upgrade to XP from ME. So when the drive broke, I got him an OEM copy. ME crashed all the time, and XP doesnt, and we increased harddrive capacity by 100%.

I had everything backed up, as you would expect, so I lost about 1 hour's worth of time on and off, and gained twice the harddrive space and a copy of XP.

See, sometimes computer problems are good things! Plus, if you are technical support, like I'm training to be, computer problems provide your income. Die machines die!!!

[Yeticorn]

If you can get data off it, great, but I would still check it for bad sectors by doing a full HD scan (may take a while). Open up cmd prompt, chkdsk <volume name here>:/f /r

See if any bad sectors come up, if there are some, I wouldn't trust data on it. If it writes to a bad sector, there goes everything.

[phen0m]

<offtopic>
@yeticorn - I have a t-shirt that says "there's no place like 127.0.0.1"
</offtopic>

It is a very good thing if they are broke, it gives you a reason to upgrade from those old tiny HD's.
I have thought about spraying some water into my win98 machine before. :)