Topic: I think my HD just crashed (again) :(

[TerraEsperZ]

Long story short (because I'm away from home for the rest of the week), I think the new hard drive I installed a few months ago (when my old one died ) has died too. Problem is, the warranty has been over for a long time, as I kept it in its box for over a year before installing it. The thing won't boot and just gives me an "Err. Lecture Disque" (Disk Read Error) after the POST screen, and since I noticed this morning right before leaving, I have no idea what I'll be able to do.



Honestly, I think I'm over caring at this point. The first time it happened, I flew into a rage about how unfair it was and for all the stuff I had lost after so many years. No, today I was more  tired than anything.



This time, I hadn't made a backup a few days prior to the accident, so I again lost a lot of stuff, stuff I had collected and prepared to back up on CDs like all my favorite ROMs, game soundtracks and such, and of course all my maps. It also means that unless I can get my data back, I lost some of those too, though thankfully, there's little that I had done that I hadn't posted in a finished form on the board, so there's at least that.



I'll keep you guys posted about this.



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"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[Maxim]

Sounds like your computer is killing the disks. Spiky electricity can do that, maybe get a new power supply for the computer (cheap) or maybe your house electrics are spiky (expensive UPS needed).

[TerraEsperZ]

The faulty power supply is my hunch as well since I've never had any problem with anything else electrical in the apartment. At this point though, it might be best to just buy a new computer altogether. The present one dates back to 2000 or 2001, doesn't support any of the newest graphics cards and thus prevents me from running anything made during the last 5 years.



I just hope there's something I can recover from the disk itself. On monday, I'll get some CD with recovery tools from work and give it a try. Thankfully, I can still use the computer itself to surf the net thanks to two Linux live-CDs that I have which can run completely in memory.



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[DarkWolf]

If you're going to be spending money on a new machine look into getting a RAID 1 setup.  It's not the best redundant setup, but it's a lot better than a single disk.

[TerraEsperZ]

That might be a good idea. Storage space has never been a priority to me and I'm really looking for reliability over anything else.



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[TerraEsperZ]

Well, the good news is that my partition and data are alright ! Using my Knoppix liveCD, I can browse all my files fine, so it's not a hardware problem as I suspected as in, the drive is dead again. Still, actually getting the system to boot normally might be difficult and I'll still look into buying a new computer if only because it would garantee some form of stability.



I'm not really looking into building a system from parts myself this time. Does anyone have computer brands to recommend, or specific systems? All I know is that Dell is forever off my list after seeing so many different models experiencing multiples failures at work.



In any case, all be back as soon as I can fix the booting problem. In the mean time, I'm just too excited that I haven't lost all my data again!



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[DarkWolf]

Dell - Good prices when you are a business looking for workstations or server with a support package.  I'd never buy one myself though.  Oh and by the way, their Vostro machines, the ones that aren't supposed to be preloaded with software, come with Google Desktop and the Google Toolbar installed.  Isn't that preloaded software???



HP - I despise their home market products and their support people are morons.



Alienware - I've never owned one, but for the price you end up paying here it seems you might as well build yourself.



Sorry I can't offer you advice on anything good.  I still build myself.

[Revned]

I hear Apple computers are nice.

[TerraEsperZ]

Well, so far XP's Recovery Console's various utilities (fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk) haven't fixed squat, but thankfully they haven't damaged my data yet. However, I'm slowly running out of ideas on how to fix whatever problem my partition has.



I just don't understand what could be so hard about repairing a partition when all the data is there and available...



As always, ideas are more than welcome on repairing my partition for the time being.



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[bustin98]

Your partition table maybe what's damaged. Just search for 'partition table repair'. I've used a program to do this, but its been a while so I forgot what I used.

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Cool beans

[marioman]

I hear that there is a program called BootMaster that is supposed to be really good at fixing those types of things...

[TerraEsperZ]

Thanks to BootMaster (and marioman), I think (more like hope) that I'm closing in on the source of the problem.



For some reason, the 160 GB hard drive I installed several months ago after my first HD crash is being seen as being 137 GB by my BIOS, something which has to do with older motherboard not supporting 48 bits addressing or something like that. Boot Master reports that my main partition goes beyond those 137 GB, which I'm pretty was the case before. At the very least, XP saw a maximum of 149 GB before (which is about right from what I've read about difference in space calculation) but I have no idea if my BIOS saw it correctly before. I assume yes, but I can't be sure.



It also sucks that Boot Master can't actually fix anything unless I register it, which I'm hesitant to do considering it might not even work. At least I've managed to back up all my relevant data thanks to Knoppix, though I hope everything I burned with it is readable by XP if/when it runs again.



At any rate, unless my BIOS can see my HD correctly, I can't do much. For one, I haven't found any BIOS update for my mother board anywhere, much less on the manufacturer's website (ECS K7S5A board), but since it worked before, it could also be the IDE controller which is damaged in some way. And even if my motherboard saw the disc correctly, I still don't know if my partition would boot correctly.



Man, this is a real nightmare, and I really dearly hope I don't have to reformat and re-install everything, which takes 3 or 4 hours just for Windows alone...



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"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[marioman]

The unregistered version doesn't fix anything, but it will tell you what it can fix.  It is relatively cheap too, so if it doesn't work, you aren't out too much money.  (But, it seems to be able to do everything that it says it can do.)



Good luck.