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Help me diagnose HDD issue

O

oboeguy

Diamond Member
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!
 
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).
 
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!
 
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
 
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
Click to expand...

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.
 
Originally posted by: Old Hippie
Originally posted by: oboeguy
Originally posted by: Old Hippie
GetDataBack and try before you buy.
Click to expand...

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

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. 😉
Click to expand...

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
 
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!
 
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