Hello,

I have an Emachines PC running XP Home. I got it to replace another machine and put in the drive from the old PC as the slave to the new PC drive. This was back in December. A few nights ago as I was listening to some music via WMP and my PC started running very slow. It basically froze and I had to reboot by turning it off via the power button. When I did, it took an unusually long time to reboot and there was a slow, sorta "tick" noise. Upon trying to log back in I found that I couldn't. I would get as far as being able to see the background on my desktop, but nothing else. It would log off and prompt me to log in again. Safe Mode was the only way I could log in. I then noticed that some of the shortcuts no longer worked. The error message said it could not find the program it was linked to. I checked the drives via My Computer and noticed that one, the old one, was not there! I tried checking via BIOS (don't have much experience with it) and it seemed that there were two drives listed, but I may have been looking at the wrong thing. I ended up reinstalling XP and was able to get my PC running, but only the new drive is available. It still took a long time to boot up and made the "tick" noise until I disconnected the ribbon-like connection from the old hard drive. Now it boots and runs fine but I want the files from the old hard drive. What are my options before I have to pay someone lotsa money? And yes, feel free to cyber-slap my knuckles with a ruler for not backing up my files. I'm a dope.

Thanks.

First-- try a new ribbon cable-- or swap one.

Then maybe this (freeware)-- if you can get in at all -- now is the time.

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery

The clicking is probably the seek arm looking and not finding-- not good.


If the drive has failed-- and it sounds that way... the only trick I ever heard of was to cannibalize an identical drive for it's circuit board-- swap them-- and it might work long enough to recover those files. If it's an older model-- you might find one on EBay used.
Other than that you're looking at a forensic recovery lab ($$$$)

Sorry

Ever tried the freezer trick? Put the hard drive in a bag, then place it in the freezer for about 30 minutes. Then, take it out of the freezer and right to the computer. Once you got it hooked up, you have a very short amount of time to recover your files.

What the cold does is contracts the parts back to their origional locations. This works quite well, but you have a very short amount of time before it warms back up.

Good idea for a seized bearing... his drive spins/seeks... but is not finding -- which could be mechanical/circuit board or bad sectors or just corruption-- but the constant seeking does not usually bode well for it's future. Add in the "overall age" of the drive -- it is in its second PC . I would not risk it--save those files now... and dump the drive for a new one-- for the price of a decent harddrive today/considering their average life they are "almost disposable" unless you are running Raptors for super-gaming speeds.

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SpinRite is really cool and will often revive a drive but if you'd just use it the once it's probably worth putting the money to a new drive instead.

You could also try booting with a linux livecd mounting the drive and try to copy the files you want over to a different hard drive.

.

Would the Linux distro automatically "see" all the files?
I have seen this mentioned before-- but since I have little or no Linux experience-- how do you mount the drive, exactly?

Would make a good tutorial...

Most LiveCD's will READ ntfs fine, it's just writing that can be a pain without extra software.

Some distros will auto mount any partitions but its easy enough to mount them manually, the commands are as follows

su
mkdir /mnt/windows
mount /dev/hda1 -t ntfs /mnt/windows

The format/meaning of the above commands are as follows

su = super user, give root or 'admin' privs.

mount = the command obviously

/dev/hda1 = device/partition. The first partition of the first disk, the second of the first disk would be hda1, hdb1 would be the first partition of the second disk etc

-t ntfs = Specify the filesystem as ntfs

/mnt/windows = the 'mount point' meaning the location where you wish to mount it.

Then just navigate to /mnt/windows with the file manager. It sounds more complicated than it actually is.