Help me diagnose HDD issue

[oboeguy]

Long story short, the HDD on my wife's Shuttle box appear to be in trouble. Suddenly her computer won't boot, with a "no operating system found" error after the POST. I tried it in my machine and found that in Vista it comes up as needing to be formatted. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!

 

[Denithor]

Use the OS disk to boot into recovery console. Take the first repair option which should put you into a DOS prompt on the harddrive. Run chkdsk /r to attempt to repair any disk errors. Finally, run fixmbr and then fixboot in that order and then reboot.

EDIT: If you cannot even get into the recovery console and have data on the drive you need to recover, try SpinRite 6.0 and see if that does the trick (stolen shamelessly from Blain in the General Hardware forum).

 

[oboeguy]

I've read that running fixmbr could cause data loss. True? I'm kicking myself for not having backed-up that drive.

Edit: where are my manners? thanks for the reply!

 

[BoboKatt]

Fixmbr or the old days of fdisk /mbr has always been my friend

Have yet to pooch an install with that... unless it was already fried and there was nothing I could do.

The other option is if all you want is to get actual documents/files/pics etc, pull the drive out.. Connect it to another computer and then format at your leisure.

Edit: have you figured out if the HD is ok? I mean is it only the OS install or any issues in BIOS actually recognizing the drive when it first posts? Good to get that out of the way

 

[oboeguy]

Originally posted by: BoboKatt
Fixmbr or the old days of fdisk /mbr has always been my friend

Have yet to pooch an install with that... unless it was already fried and there was nothing I could do.

The other option is if all you want is to get actual documents/files/pics etc, pull the drive out.. Connect it to another computer and then format at your leisure.

Edit: have you figured out if the HD is ok? I mean is it only the OS install or any issues in BIOS actually recognizing the drive when it first posts? Good to get that out of the way

I thought I'd made it clear that the BIOS recognizes the drive on the POST when the drive is plugged into another machine. What happens when I boot to Vista (off the other machine's boot drive, natch) is that the drive shows-up in Explorer but at zero capacity and seemingly in need of a format. I really want to preserve the data on the disk. Any more suggestions? Thanks again.

 

[Old Hippie]

GetDataBack and try before you buy.

 

[oboeguy]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
GetDataBack and try before you buy.

Wow that appears to be a great tool. I'll have to give it a closer look. Thanks!

 

[Old Hippie]

Originally posted by: oboeguy

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
GetDataBack and try before you buy.

Wow that appears to be a great tool. I'll have to give it a closer look. Thanks!

I play with my machines all of the time.

Getdataback and Acronis are two I actually pay for and have saved my buns many-a-time.

 

[oboeguy]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie

Originally posted by: oboeguy

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
GetDataBack and try before you buy.

Wow that appears to be a great tool. I'll have to give it a closer look. Thanks!

I play with my machines all of the time.

Getdataback and Acronis are two I actually pay for and have saved my buns many-a-time.

My buns definitely need saving -- the look on the wife's face when I mentioned that her machine hadn't been backed-up in a while wasn't one I'd soon see again. But seriously... you get the point.

Edit: typo

 

[Old Hippie]

the look on the wife's face when I mentioned that her machine hadn't been backed-up in a while wasn't one I'd soon see again.

I hate that stuff.

Good Luck!

 

[oboeguy]

GetDataBack didn't even break a sweat recovering my data. PHEW!!! Close call. Now I feel confident trying the fixmbr stuff to try to get the disk going again. Thanks, Old Hippie!