I went out of town for a week for work, and left my Dell 8400 on while I was gone. Normally this is not a problem -- the box is usually on 24x7. I have a UPS for power and generally have had no issues with the box since I purchased it in Jan 2005.
The box runs Windows XP Home and I have various Oracle server software and other development tools installed on it. Plus I run Bittorrent on and off. I don't game on it, just use my Xbox. The machine is basically stock, with 1gb DDR2 and a 160gb SATA drive.
I recently installed an Avermedia A180 HDTV PCI card. It installed cleanly and with no issues. I also have Daemon Tools installed on the box for accessing ISOs directly (this might be important in another paragraph or two).
So I get home, move the mouse and click a few keys, and the machine does not respond. So I killed the power and restarted. The "Windows is loading" screen came up and the status bar at the bottom scrolled by, never freezing or anything, but never proceeding to load Windows fully.
Eventually I killed the power again, and tried safe mode. Various system drivers scroll by, then "Loading d347bus.sys, press ESC to cancel" pops up and that's as far as it gets. I rebooted again, and hit ESC to cancel loading that driver, and I get the same result. I looked online and d347bus.sys seems to be a Daemon Tools driver.
Various people online with similar problems report success once they get into the hard drive and rename the Daemon Tools files. So I figured, this sounds like a good plan.
I built a Bart PE disc and it didn't load my SATA hard drive because it didn't have the Intel 925X drivers. I downloaded the floppy version, restarted the Bart PE disc and hit F6 to load the drivers, and got a BSOD. So I put the Intel drivers in the PE drivers directory, rebuilt the Bart PE disc, and got a BSOD while loading Windows. The same thing happens with UBCD4Win which is not really a surprise given that it is simply Barts + lots of drivers. I tried not only the most recent Intel SATA drivers but also the previous version, same result, BSOD.
Finally, I also tried a Linux system recovery cd based on Debian. I copied the ntfs drivers and attempted to mount the drive using Captive, and it failed as well. Recently Linux kernel builds support the Intel SATA chip in this Dell, but of course its an NTFS file system which Linux cannot natively write to, and I need to rename these files to get it to boot, I think.
And yes the machine is still under warranty, but I'd like to get my files off before reloading the system files to an "as delivered" state using the Dell utilities.
Of course this is an SATA hard drive... and that's my only box with SATA. So I can't even move the drive to another machine and try to recover things.
So, any suggestions?? I've looked for an external SATA to USB2 box but they are not as common as IDE to USB/FW. Would an IDE to SATA converter work and allow me to use this SATA drive in another machine or IDE to USB external box, using the IDE bus?? Ideally I'd like to solve this problem without spending much...
The box runs Windows XP Home and I have various Oracle server software and other development tools installed on it. Plus I run Bittorrent on and off. I don't game on it, just use my Xbox. The machine is basically stock, with 1gb DDR2 and a 160gb SATA drive.
I recently installed an Avermedia A180 HDTV PCI card. It installed cleanly and with no issues. I also have Daemon Tools installed on the box for accessing ISOs directly (this might be important in another paragraph or two).
So I get home, move the mouse and click a few keys, and the machine does not respond. So I killed the power and restarted. The "Windows is loading" screen came up and the status bar at the bottom scrolled by, never freezing or anything, but never proceeding to load Windows fully.
Eventually I killed the power again, and tried safe mode. Various system drivers scroll by, then "Loading d347bus.sys, press ESC to cancel" pops up and that's as far as it gets. I rebooted again, and hit ESC to cancel loading that driver, and I get the same result. I looked online and d347bus.sys seems to be a Daemon Tools driver.
Various people online with similar problems report success once they get into the hard drive and rename the Daemon Tools files. So I figured, this sounds like a good plan.
I built a Bart PE disc and it didn't load my SATA hard drive because it didn't have the Intel 925X drivers. I downloaded the floppy version, restarted the Bart PE disc and hit F6 to load the drivers, and got a BSOD. So I put the Intel drivers in the PE drivers directory, rebuilt the Bart PE disc, and got a BSOD while loading Windows. The same thing happens with UBCD4Win which is not really a surprise given that it is simply Barts + lots of drivers. I tried not only the most recent Intel SATA drivers but also the previous version, same result, BSOD.
Finally, I also tried a Linux system recovery cd based on Debian. I copied the ntfs drivers and attempted to mount the drive using Captive, and it failed as well. Recently Linux kernel builds support the Intel SATA chip in this Dell, but of course its an NTFS file system which Linux cannot natively write to, and I need to rename these files to get it to boot, I think.
And yes the machine is still under warranty, but I'd like to get my files off before reloading the system files to an "as delivered" state using the Dell utilities.
Of course this is an SATA hard drive... and that's my only box with SATA. So I can't even move the drive to another machine and try to recover things.
So, any suggestions?? I've looked for an external SATA to USB2 box but they are not as common as IDE to USB/FW. Would an IDE to SATA converter work and allow me to use this SATA drive in another machine or IDE to USB external box, using the IDE bus?? Ideally I'd like to solve this problem without spending much...
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