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er blackout, friends computers HDD goin a little crazy

N

niwi7

Golden Member
Heard all this from the phone---- ...anyway it seems that

During blackout the lights kept on flickering before going out probably making the computer flicker on and off....today he gets his power back and fires up the PC (K6-2 500MHZ, WIN 98, 64MB RAM, 20 GIG HDD...upgrading soon)

anyway when he tries to go through scandisk it freezes @ 45%

if he cancels scandisk and goes to windows he gets a dos screen saying some kind of sector boot error retry abort or ignore and none of the 3 options work....

think the BO could have damaged the HDD and if so how....i mean would it have just fried it so it doesnt work or done this to it? maybe coincidental....who knows

anyway im gunna go over there in a few days....should i just maybe format the drive and do a clean windows install? hmmmmmm any ideas?
 
Originally posted by: niwi7
THX ANY1 ELSE? SRY 4 CAPS
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There is a backspace key, you know. 😛

Do a full format with bad sector check. I'm willing to bet more than a few usable megs got eaten there. Or hey - he wants to upgrade anyways. Now seems like a good time. 😉

- M4H
 
I think my comp may have been seriously hurt from the blackout too. 24 hrs after, I'm gettin a disk read error. Can't even start up. Just did a reformat on Wednesday, not doing it again to just get the same results. I think I need to get a new HD.
 
Originally posted by: wetcat007
Do people not consider unplugging their computers when the power is out?
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Well DUH!! can you predict the future?

Can you say when power outages will occur?

Of course if we knew in advance when the power was going to be out we would have turned off out pcs.
rolleye.gif
 
Originally posted by: NakaNaka
Reallly. The blackout in NYC just hit and bam ... that was it. Not like God gave me a 10 second warning.
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Yep that's how it happened,I was doing a defrag at the time too!! :Q


I guess I was lucky because no bad or missing files occured,I was real lucky. :heart:
 
Try running the disc utility, maxtor has an option to fix bad sectors, but I'm not sure if it works or not.

if not then just reformat, and he should cross his fingers that it wont work, so he'll have a pitiful excuse to get a newer comp.

It's possible that the arm came slamming down on the platters because of the convulsions of electricity, that would definately cause a badsector, and crash when that spot was reached. (that would be an RMA, but guessing from the 64 MB of RAM, you aint got no warranty)
 
My game server had just started up at 4pm the day of the blackout. It would have run about 15 mins as the UPS slowly ran out of juice. Today the hard drive fails, coincidence?
 
Lost power here too. Didn't go out instantly though, had a short brown-out, then the power came back up, then out go the lights. I've heard a brown out is worse on computers than the power going right out. Anyway, when it came back on about 6 hours later, everything was fine (whew!). Then I immediately ordered a Belkin Universal UPS 1200 VA with automatic voltage regulation. Not gonna take that chance again.
 
Originally posted by: Sarge1
Lost power here too. Didn't go out instantly though, had a short brown-out, then the power came back up, then out go the lights. I've heard a brown out is worse on computers than the power going right out. Anyway, when it came back on about 6 hours later, everything was fine (whew!). Then I immediately ordered a Belkin Universal UPS 1200 VA with automatic voltage regulation. Not gonna take that chance again.
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You'll like that UPS. Same model saved my butt during the blackout. It waited 10 minutes for the power to come back, and when it didn't, the control software saved out a hibernation session then gracefully shut down. When the power came back on, I switched on the UPS, hit the power button on the computer, and it reloaded to right where I left off. Nice.

The voltage regulation is also quite nice. We've got poor power in my neighborhood - when too many people use the A/C, the line voltage drops to about 108v, which used to send my old APS UPS in to a fit.
 
maybe the drive was borderline before the blackout? i thought drives were designed against head crashing now if power was lost.
 
You'll like that UPS. Same model saved my butt during the blackout.
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Thanks Cadaver, I've done a little research on UPS's, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. So, I just ordered the biggest brand name one I could find with voltage regulation for not much over $100. Glad to here I picked a good one!
 
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