Calling all Dalars!

Archived discussion from Toril-2.
Thilindel
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Calling all Dalars!

Postby Thilindel » Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:15 pm

Alrighty, my elderly neighbor's hubby died. The lady wants me to help her get her photos off the computer. But the trouble is this computer is like 6 years old or so. They had windows xp when it tries to load. As it loads, the screen blinks briefly saying something corrupted the hive or sector. Then it flashes and starts all over as if someone shut off the power. It just loops like that. I don't know how to get her pics off and since she's not all too rich, etc. Any ideas what's up w/that windows program? I was gonna try booting with dos disk and see. When in bios, I got it to try in safe mode for loading, same result tho - flashes and starts counting its ram and cache memory..
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Postby Vikaz » Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:17 pm

Take the disk out and plug it to another computer.
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Postby Kifle » Thu Jul 13, 2006 10:00 pm

Sounds like near fatal hard drive failure...it'll be very iffy if you can get the pics off. You can try to repair the corrupt sectors with some free/shareware programs out there, or try to hide them with scandisk. As a last resort, I've heard of people putting drives in the freezer for a bit and then hooking them up right away for quick grabs of info; however, this usually renders the hard drive even worse off than it was in the first place. And yes, this actually does work.
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Postby Jhorr » Fri Jul 14, 2006 12:37 am

Vikaz' idea might work.

Take her hard drive out of her computer and configure it as a slave drive in another computer. When you boot up, go directly into the motherboard BIOS and look to see if her hard disk shows up. If so, continue to boot from the master (original) hard drive.

When Windows appears, go to My Computer and see if her disk is there. Then attempt salvage.
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Postby Dalar » Fri Jul 14, 2006 12:55 am

Kifle wrote:Sounds like near fatal hard drive failure...it'll be very iffy if you can get the pics off. You can try to repair the corrupt sectors with some free/shareware programs out there, or try to hide them with scandisk. As a last resort, I've heard of people putting drives in the freezer for a bit and then hooking them up right away for quick grabs of info; however, this usually renders the hard drive even worse off than it was in the first place. And yes, this actually does work.

Haven't seen too many HD failures. THe one I can remember just made the OS not load and load incredibly slow. I'd try Vikaz's solution first.
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Postby Kifle » Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:06 am

Dalar wrote:
Kifle wrote:Sounds like near fatal hard drive failure...it'll be very iffy if you can get the pics off. You can try to repair the corrupt sectors with some free/shareware programs out there, or try to hide them with scandisk. As a last resort, I've heard of people putting drives in the freezer for a bit and then hooking them up right away for quick grabs of info; however, this usually renders the hard drive even worse off than it was in the first place. And yes, this actually does work.

Haven't seen too many HD failures. THe one I can remember just made the OS not load and load incredibly slow. I'd try Vikaz's solution first.


Yeah, I'd try vak's idea as well, but I've seen a lot of times that you the computer wont recognize the disk depending how bad the sector corruption is and how far it spread. The freezing is definately a last ditch effort.
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Postby rylan » Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:14 am

Freezing helps if the drive motor or head servo is dying.
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Postby Glorishan » Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:30 am

I recently had a similar problem. My laptop HD crashed hard, and would not boot. I took it out of the computer, hooked it up as an external hard drive, and was able to recover about 80% of the data. Some of it was toast, but it's worth a shot. Putting it in the freezer works typically if you do it right after it crashes the 1st time, but if it's been stuck in a loop for awhile, your luck will likely go down.
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Postby Thilindel » Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:50 am

cool thanks guys..having some luck but it's really whining when I try accessing it. Some reason, her hubby transferred all the wedding pics, which are way back from WWII in germany so it'd seem, and other pics ..anyway they're on the drive and she's hoping I'll get them printed up or what not. I hate knowing just enough to know i don't know what I'm doing :P
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Postby teflor the ranger » Fri Jul 14, 2006 3:16 am

Windows XP will usually do this automatically, but you may not have XP or any such luck. By default, your operating system will try to access the drive at the highest speeds possible. Of course, for hard drives that aren't working that well, this can make things very difficult.

One thing you might try is to force Windows to access the drive in the slowest mode available. From the device manager, check to see which IDE channel your slaved, sick disk is on, then right click on the IDE channel > properties > advanced settings > Transfer Mode to PIO Only.

This may not be necessary as long as you can access the drive. Don't forget to set it back to DMA when you're all done.
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Postby Glorishan » Fri Jul 14, 2006 3:28 am

As a last resort, if none of this works, for a couple hundred bucks you can take the HD to a computer repair center, and they can typically make a clone of it.
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Postby Thilindel » Fri Jul 14, 2006 4:38 am

Hmm, ok. Now _her_ harddrive is my 'F' drive. I did what you guys said in putting it in my computer as the 'slave.' It seems I have full access and it's totally quiet. There was a ton of dog hair all over the guts of her computer..yech. Now I don't know much of squat about computers but I can see it says it's a 32 Gig harddrive. My computer is a 150 gig harddrive and I don't have any kind of Windows disk. Luckily both have the Windows XP so at least I _seem_ to have full access to her harddrive. Her windows folder opens when I click on it.

Is there a way I can make her windows re-install itself? At least this would save her some trouble.
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Postby Ruxur » Fri Jul 14, 2006 2:25 pm

you would need a windows xp cd, the feature you are looking for is commonly called a repair install.

boot from the cd, and contine as if you are installing a fresh copy of windows, until it detects the old installation and asks if you want to repair it.
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Postby Thilindel » Fri Jul 14, 2006 4:14 pm

That did it! Hehe, you guys saved her harddrive and doing what you all said, I got her computer back together to boot. I should have her email some grandma cookies :)
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Postby Lilira » Fri Jul 14, 2006 4:16 pm

Download pics and BURN THEM TO CD! *grin*

Then have her take them to Walmart for paper copies. :-)
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Postby Ruxur » Fri Jul 14, 2006 8:15 pm

Thilindel wrote:That did it! Hehe, you guys saved her harddrive and doing what you all said, I got her computer back together to boot. I should have her email some grandma cookies :)


what actually worked?
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Thilindel
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Postby Thilindel » Fri Jul 14, 2006 10:37 pm

well I put her harddrive as my slave drive. Then stumbled around copying my windows files over hers. I have NO idea what I needed to do. Then I got a windows disk like told, but I couldn't get it to do the slave harddrive, just the master. When hers was the master, it wouldn't boot up. I tried a dos disk and it said the harddrive when I tried to access was 'invalid.' Then lastly I copied all the system/system32 files from that disk to the F drive. Splat perfect :)

She's almost 90 so I really felt bad for her. I used to tease the hubby that he was a 92 yr old (web) surfer. Doubt I could learn that type stuff 60 years from now!
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Postby Gormal » Sat Jul 15, 2006 7:45 am

MAXLER FIXEZ COMPEWTERS!

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