Hard Drive or Motherboard Dead?

[uberlad]

My housemates' computer died last week, and I got a look at it yesterday. I@ve never seen the problem but it does look pretty bad:

The machine POSTs fine, and gets to the drive detection. When it tries to detect the HD instead of getting the drives ID string (a 30Gb Fujitsu I think) it gets a random string of ASCII chars, and locks up (presumebly trying to initialise this mad drive using whatever screwed up interface data it has got.

I've not had a chance to open the machine up yet, that's tonights entertainment, but I'm just wondering if anyone has seen this before.

Also any suggestions about how I can get the machine to boot enough so that I can run some kind of drive fixing software on the damn thing would be deeply appreciated.

I think the machine is detecting the DVD-ROM drive fine, but couldn't swear to that atm.

Ta guys

Uberlad

[Technoid]

Most likely the HDD or the cable.....

[uberlad]

God, I hope it's the cable.

That would make my evening far less fiddly.

Uberlad

[rubank]

Start from floppy, run fdisk and format.

Then use a data recovery tool, líke <a href="http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue" target="_blank">this one</a> (freeware)

rubank

[uberlad]

The machine won't boot with the drive connected. And if I disable it in the BIOS then DOS won't be able to see it. Or am I mad for thinking that?

Ta for the link to data recovery, it's prolly gonna come down to that at some point.

Luckily I think all the important data (Buffy episodes 8-) has been burned onto CD, so if it comes to a complete slash and burn it shouldn't sting too bad.

Uberlad

[The PIT]

Before doing the formatting try the drive in another machine if possible. It could also the ide channel going down try the other channel.

[Dr Mordrid]

I've had drives seem to fail when the problem was really an ABIT BH6's BIOS getting ready to take a hike. This was confirmed when the system refused to POST under any conditions.

What made diagnosing the problem hard was that the BIOS eventually died totally, which took AGP and most PCI functions with it. This, of course, made it impossible to see any error messages on the AGP display card. DOS wouldn't even boot up.

I finally got a canned "dead BIOS" message by putting in an old PCI video card that happened to have the old text mode. Once I had it installed I could see that it was prompting for a floppy with a BIOS file on it. I prepared the floppy on another system, plugged it in and the BIOS was reinstalled with no problems. The system's been running for 6 months.

Not to say that all boards will display this "dead BIOS" message, but it's worth keeping an old PCI display around just in case.

Dr. Mordrid

[uberlad]

This is the only problem with mentioning this kind of problem on MURC, there's always someone whose similar problem indicated an end of the world situation.

My plan is to take it apart, get out all the dust, disconnect all the cables, reconnect all the cables if nothing looks fried, pop the CMOS battery and hope that that'll sort it.

Of course, the motherboard could have serious issues.

Or the HD could be proper dead

Or a variety of other depressing problems could have occured.

But I@m not going to think about that.

I'd better pick up some beer for this evening.

Uberlad

[Novdid]

I was going to repeat Doc's suggestion, but I won't as he put it in words quite nicely.

Tell me in what other forum would you get so many good responses in such a short time???

Edit: I meant Dr Mordrid not Kv!!!

[rubank]

I was sloppy reading your post. If the BIOS don´t see the HDD, DOS won´t either.

On a second thought, have there been another drive in that box before?
Some HDD:s won´t be detected by BIOS if they are jumpered as "master, slave present" if there is no slave. It that case the jumper must be removed for BIOS to see the drive. It´s the same if the CDrom has been on the same channel and has been moved to it´s own, of course.

rubank

[uberlad]

rubank - The box has never had another drive in it, I built the machine last May and it's sat there unchanged all this time. Updates tomorrow hopefully when I@ve fixed it.

Novdid - I don't believe there _is_ another forum where I could get such quick, useful responses. You guys are the greatest.

Uberlad

[Wombat]

I think Doc may be on to it with the BIOS. I think that your motherboard needs attention first. You don't need the HD connected to re-flash. Don't just clear the CMOS, reflash at this point: something other than user-settable bits are out of whack.

[uberlad]

Right. Update.

Despair - The drive is similarly dead in my machine, sometimes boots as no drive, other times hangs the machine on boot.

I'm thinking the drive is very dead.

If the machine cannot detect the drive, there's no way for me to extract the data is there?

Prolly the best I can hope for is getting it RMA'd by fujitsu.

Damn.

Uberlad

--EDIT--

I bought it from Scan (www.scan.co.uk), but have probably lost the invoice, and definitely lost the order number. What do you think the chances of me getting anythgin from their RMA dept after 11 months or so? Seems very little to me.
-- EDIT --

[Wombat]

Depends. Did you pay by credit card? Old statements usually work as proof of purchase.

Also, if the drive goes to the manufacturer for repair, they are likely to just swap the electronics and send the drive back. Same drive, same data.