Hard Drive Problem
Don't really know what your problem is since you are first saying that your hard drive was shuttling down and then you say in a later post your tower is shutting down. But, I can sympathize with you if you are a novice and as time goes by you will learn a lot more and give a very accurate description of what's happening to your computer.
Anyhow, my harddrive was shutting down and acting strange in general. So I decided to do a thorough scan and to fix any problems during surface scan. Well, my drive with Windows 98 would no longer boot up. When I first turn on the computer a screen comes on giving the status of the harddrive noting that the disk problems were fix. Than at the bottom I have to press F1 to boot. I see a partial boot seeing some of the contents of the autoexec file and then the scandisk screen comes on. My harddrive keeps making these funny little noises over and over with the scandisk screen doing nothing.
Any advice from anyone, how I can get into this thing? I can use a start up disk to at least changing the A prompt to the C prompt and viewing the contents of the directory. But, when it gets to the end of the listing the hard drive starts that funny little noise again repeating itself.
Hope I can at least recover my files and folders. I'm still waiting for my recovery and restore software, but I'm wondering if this thing can be fix without the software if it can fixed at all?
This is the 2nd drive to die on me but this time I'm keeping it to see what I can do. Like a dummy I threw the other one away.
:banghead:
Anyhow, my harddrive was shutting down and acting strange in general. So I decided to do a thorough scan and to fix any problems during surface scan. Well, my drive with Windows 98 would no longer boot up. When I first turn on the computer a screen comes on giving the status of the harddrive noting that the disk problems were fix. Than at the bottom I have to press F1 to boot. I see a partial boot seeing some of the contents of the autoexec file and then the scandisk screen comes on. My harddrive keeps making these funny little noises over and over with the scandisk screen doing nothing.
Any advice from anyone, how I can get into this thing? I can use a start up disk to at least changing the A prompt to the C prompt and viewing the contents of the directory. But, when it gets to the end of the listing the hard drive starts that funny little noise again repeating itself.
Hope I can at least recover my files and folders. I'm still waiting for my recovery and restore software, but I'm wondering if this thing can be fix without the software if it can fixed at all?
This is the 2nd drive to die on me but this time I'm keeping it to see what I can do. Like a dummy I threw the other one away.
:banghead:
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Can't provide the information on this computer because it is a homebuilt where I bought the parts over a period of time. However the motherboard is an Intel with a Celeron processor. But my first hard drive was lost in a Compaq Presario 6000.
However, the drive that just crashed has Windows98SE. I had problems with it since the day I installed the software. Had to keep doing things like fixing the registry and other undesireable things. So I had been aware that something might happen to this drive sooner or later.
I quickly got another drive in my homebuilt and up and running again. In fact I'm using my homebuilt right now. I've had it for around 4 years now and it's very upgradable. That's why I decided to build one. I won't even use my Compaq unless it is to check an Internet problem, because I hate Windows XP and it is slower though both computers is 1GHZ.
I'm looking forward to getting my software and hopefully I can at least recover my personal files, though the lose isn't that great. I'm usually pretty good about backing up my files. I just need to do this everytime a new file is created and not wait until I get 2 or 3 files over a few days.
:wow:
Even if that's the case (hah - a pun!) you can always run the Belarc Advisor to get a list of what's inside.
Did you do something that stupid?
:hitit2:
Your are right. It is about Suzanne's computer. And if you read my first post again, you will see where I point out about giving a good description of what's going on with her computer giving my own example. But, since we were on the subject I decided to ask for help myself. After all I sometimes run into problems.
Anyhow I hope Suzanne PMed one of the other members to get her problem worked out. She just may have nothing more than a bad connection between computer and wall or even a bad power supply if it's in her tower. And the way she is talking, those two things seems to be one of the problems. I've replaced power supplies in other people's computers and no more problems. But I asked a series of questions to see where the problem is when a person is a novice like Suzanne. And that is what some of the members here should have done too. Either the wrong questions were asked or not enough questions were ask.
And as far as getting help on anything about my computer on this board it has never happened with me eventually figuring things out for myself.
Who you? A moderator? What you did don't mean anything to me. :thumbsdow
Suzanne
I got some good news for you. If it is your hard drive and it sure sounds like it to me since I lost 2 hard drives with the problems you told me about. I found a way to recover all my files from the bad hard drive putting them all on a good drive without any fancy software. The only other thing I used was my startup disk.
If the lights on your computer is staying on, making it seem more like the computer is restarting rather than completely shutting down, there is a good chance that it is your hard drive and it's just a matter of time when it dies just like my 2 hard drives. But, now that I learned how to recover files I can recover them as long as the hard drive disks are spinning and I'm hearing noises. So be prepared for that hard drive to die sooner or later. You can read about hard drives dying all over the Internet. It's quite a problem.
:celebrate
What is your problem? You are welcome to be a member here, but try not to act like it's YOUR site and you run it. I'm sorry if you feel sensitive and defensive - there's no need to. Take those feelings elsewhere. I'm sure we can find a grumpy teenager site for you.
Leonardo
Moderator
So, it's OK for the moderators to insult members is it? True, this isn't my site, but I don't like my intelligence insulted either when people like Profdlp say things like "What happened, did you weld the case shut after you were done building it?" He is the one that started it all and should apology. So I think the moderators should set a good example and be sensitive enough to think before they speak.
And how do you know that I'm a teenager anyhow? I was a teenager 40 years ago.
Looks to me like it was a joke. (unless you dis-abled the similies), and then offered you a way to check via software to get your info. If your not a grumpy teenager, you sure come across like one (at least in these posts).
For what it's worth, I thought you were all set. You realized you had a dead drive and were waiting for recovery software.
My friend, I have no intention of getting into an argument with you. I also have no intention of apologizing for trying to help you, other than apologizing to myself for wasting my time.
XPhater, is your hard drive issue resolved? Is there anything else we can help you with, Sir?
I'm glad to hear that he was just joking. But, I at first didn't particularly see it that way, because you wouldn't believe the people who would do such outlandish things to their epuipment, including welding a computer case together if they were told to. I guess you all remember the CB craze don't you? Well, that is another thing I use to work on to make money on the side. Some guy brought me a CB to fix. And as soon as I opened it up half the circuit board was fried. I refuse to do anything to it and that is when he told me that he attached a 110 volt cord and plug to it and plugged it into the wall instead of putting a 12 volt power supply on the CB. And some of the computers I've looked at are real nightmares after everyone else worked on them. True I don't know as much as I would like to about computers, but it's enough to make me some pretty good money on the side. But, because I'm a woman into this sort of thing, I have some really nasty statements made to my and I guess that is why I'm so defensive. I don't even work amateur radio anymore because women are a taboo to this man's hobby. I'm KF9VW and became an amateur radio operator in the late 70's. I bought my first computer in 1982.
So I'm sorry that I didn't see his comment as a joke under the circumstances. I don't really want to stir up trouble, but I hope you all understand why I do get defensive sometimes.
Thank you for coming to Short-Media. We are often a bit rough and tumble here, as tech sites tend to attract more males than females. Please understand though that we respect everyone here regardless of sex, ethnic bacground, nationality, or philosphical makeup. Sometimes the humor can be cutting. (It's even worse when we staff members go at each other!)
Please consider yourself a Short-Media member in full. Please provide whatever contributions you can; we'll return with a community spirit for you and provide whatever assistance we can. Believe me, we need more female moderating personalities here!
ps....You are an amateur radio operator? You have my respect...I never made it past novice...hated morse code.....:)
I decided not to fix the drive, but I think maybe it can be reformatted. It seems to have no disk errors on it. I just think that after running a thorough scan which fixed the disk errors, something happened and the drive haven't booted up since. However, one of the messages that I get when I first turn on the computer is that all the disk errors have been fixed.
But, I was able to come up with a method of recovering all my personal files using the bad drive set for master and a second good drive for slave along with my start up floppy. I was able to recover every file that I had on the bad drive through a series of DOS commands.
But, I strongly urge that when you get ready to check out the recovered files on your good drive to make sure you do not have any of the Norton Protection software or any antivirus software in Windows. Your system will get messed up big time and I just got through working out the problems I started having and had a lot of trouble getting my ME on my homebuilt straightened out. Get all sorts of weird things. I have another drive with Windows ME for a spare and will use that Windows if I decided to recover other files from the bad drive. It doesn't have anti-virus software on it which explains why I didn't have problems.
I guess I'll never like XP, because I don't like all the 3D stuff and high resolution, so I set it up so it looks more like Windows ME. I also deleted McAffee, which speeded up XP considerably. Runs as fast as this computer now. I have plenty of memory because I added more memory. Thinks it's 512mb. I install Norton Security Suite, which I like so much better. I clicked for Norton to replace the XP filewire. A much improved XP, so I don't hate it quite so much now. I just kind of like the older versions of Windows, because I can navigate around them better.
Yes, I'm an Advance class amateur radio operator and would like to upgrade to Extra if I can find the time to study. I love morse code myself and worked ham mostly in morse code. I was reading about 20wpm, but now I'm rusty and would have to start all over again.
firewall - hardware firewall on your router; if you still desire or need a software firewall, there are plenty of excellent freeware and shareware firewalls available
malware/spyware/trojan protection - Ad-aware, SpyBot, SpywareBlaster. These are all freeware and are excellent. They also have minimal running processes.
Antivirus - AVG, personal edition (free, and very good)
Registry cleaner - RegCleaner (free, very good)
excess files cleanup - CCleaner (free, excellent)
In my opinion, Norton Security/Systemworks is similar to AOL - a lot of bloat that used to be good before other options became available.
I'm also hearing good things about, believe it or not, Microsoft's anti-virus program, but have not used it myself.
Being on dial up using an older Windows system it's a little harder for a virus to get into my computer, especially since I'm not on line all the time and that is why I don't use DSL. I guess a lot of people have good luck with it, but a lot of people has lost there computer motherboards and harddrives too because a virus got in such as in my case a couple of years ago. So I kept my dial up and dropped DSL. There was a couple of people at my work even that lost there computers after connecting to DSL. I've read a lot of bad stuff about DSL after my ordeal. It was a very expensive lesson for me, because I had to buy a new motherboard, processor and harddrive. That is how messed up my Compaq was after DSL. But, it's up and running better than ever with the new equipment. May have a Compaq case but it isn't no longer a Compaq inside.
And you say "a lot of people has lost there computer motherboards and harddrives too because a virus got in such as in my case a couple of years ago. So I kept my dial up and dropped DSL. There was a couple of people at my work even that lost there computers after connecting to DSL."
Tex
-Prof