Hard Drive concerns (1 Viewer)

[Paul_Nyman]

Tuesday night I came home and our PC Win XP is on, but the screen had a message that it couldn't boot up. I went out an bought a new harddrive and installed XP OS. What concerns me is that at the moment during the OS install the monitors blue screen lists a growing list about 55,000 (or now upto 68,000) of unreadable files. I was wondering if the unreadable fact is effecting the XP install on the new Hard drive?

The old hard drive is set up as slave so maybe I can copy old files later on.

Can anyone recall seeing numbers of files listed unreadable during an OS install before.

Thanks for any help!

 

[bobbyg2]

When I installed my OS on my computer, there wasn't anything related to 'unreadable' files.

I don't know what to tell ya, but my only guess would be your memory...

 

[Paul_Nyman]

Hi Bobbyg2,

My new XP is running. Dskchk was running earlier and that is over. I cannot see the old HardDrive set up Slave at the moment anywhere, no properties are listed. Under the drives it shows something plugged in, but nothing else. I wonder if I should unplug it and replug it in again see if that works. Anything else you could recommend?

Thanks for your comments!

 

[bobbyg2]

I think you have to format the slave drive. I'm not sure since I only have 1 hard drive hooked up and have no experience with setting up a slave. Sorry, but good luck!

EDIT:

I was wrong, but I figured you had to use a jumper:


http://www.geek.com/sysup/upques108.htm

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

If we're talking about plain old ATA drives with ribbon cables then yes, the first drive that you boot from has to have its jumpers set as "Master" (or CS, cable select, but explicitly selecting the "master" mode is more foolproof.)

The second drive, if connected to the same ribbon cable and the second connector on it, has to be set in slave mode.

Most computers have more than one ATA port on the motherboard, and if the other drive is connected on another cable entirely then it should also be in master mode. However, I'm assuming you're going to use the same cable, and since the old drive used to be the only drive it is almost guaranteed to be in master mode if you haven't changed that.

If you have SATA drives, of course, then the drives have their own dedicated cables and connectors and will then of course not have any jumpers on them.

If you cannot see the second drive, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools and select Computer Management. Click on Disk Management and it should list any drives the computer can see; Disk 0 being the boot drive, Disk 1 being the secondary and CD-ROM 0 being the first (possibly only) CD/DVD drive, etc.

If your second drive is visible in the list of drives, but doesn't have a drive letter assigned to it, then it won't be visible in the "My Computer" box, for instance. To assign a drive letter to it and make it visible, right-click on the drive in the list and choose "Change drive letter and paths" and assign it a letter.

If you don't see more than Disk 0 in the list of hard drives here, your old drive is most likely toast completely and you can kiss your files goodbye, or get the drive to a specialist company who can extract the data for you at probably quite substantial cost.

As for the unreadable files, I'm not sure which files were unreadable but if they were unreadable on the new hard drive you may have some more serious issues with the entire system. Hard to tell just based on your description.

 

[Stacey]

I may be wrong but it sounds like you may have installed your new OS on the old hard drive (the one that failed to boot) which could explaing the unreadable messages you got.

Other than that, definately check your master / slave jumpers on the drives.

 

[Paul_Nyman]

Hi, Kimmo,

Thank you for the help too. Yes that's how I hooked the drives up.

Update:

I looked in Disk Management as you suggested and it shows both drives. Under "My Computer" the old drive is shown as Local Disk: D. When I select it, it will ask me to do a format. I'm concerned it would lose data, or anything by doing Format. I'm worried what the Format is going to do to the old drive first and foremost.

If I shutdown or reboot the computer. There's a message which says "Dell Disk Monitoring System indicates Drive 1 on Primary EIDE Controller is operating outside of Normal specifications. Backup your data!" Then screen switches to select F1 or F2 to goto Setup option. Next it goes into DiskCheck immediately and I cancelled it and takes me to the XP opening.

when I open a program on the desktop and try to move or resize the window with my mouse it appears to be wavy like it was a piece of paper underwater? Almost slow-motion like?

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

You definitely should not format it if you want to get data back from it. Formatting will not in itself destroy data, but it will make finding it a heck of a lot harder.

However, if XP doesn't recognize the data on the drive, you will have to do some sort of repair on it. You should probably get some sort of data recovery program and let it try, if you can't find a true expert anywhere nearby to help. Something like Getdataback or a similar program might do the trick.

No clue as to why the window moving is slow... except if you are lacking proper graphics drivers perhaps.

 

[Paul_Nyman]

I finished installing SP2 and everything is running smooth again.
I was able to take an image of the harddrive and will work on that at home to recover something if possible. I decide to put the old hard drive in a anti-static bag and stored in a safe carton. I will take it in for examination to see if the rest of the data can be recovered.

Thanks for the help everyone who responded!