Hard drive failure.....IDID IT!!!!!

[Surfhead]

I have a WD 10.2 Caviar HD. Computer wont boot. States non system disk. Try to boot up in safe mode, nothing. At the C prompt, when I look at the directory, the HD shows Just the windows directory which is empty. The drive shows about 4 gigs of space, which is what I had left before the crash. What's my course of action?
Thanks.

I re-installed windows. It took about three hours. Winows repared the directory structure, and renamed some of the directories; Ie My Documents are now DIR00004, but i didn't loose any of the data that was on my HD. I'd going to burn some CD back-ups of my photos and documents (about three gigs) then I'll wipe it out , re-format and start fresh.

 

[angel1610]

Insert your bootdisk and at command promtp type sys c:
That should bring back your system.
!!!!!!!!!!If your using win98 or winme not w2k!!!!!!!!!

 

[ceraph]

If your windows directory is empty you're going to have a larger problem than just restoring the boot sector so you can boot.

If you had a crash that caused your file table to corrupt, or produced bad sectors/clusters you're going to have to reformat and reinstall. No other solution will return stability, as long as you've used a program that has marked your bad sectors, assuming you've had any.

Also, if you'd had a disk crash with sector or other issues, most brand name HD's have a 1-3 year warranty that you can invoke from the manufacturer. They usually have an option where they ship you the drive first, take down a credit card number, and if you don't return YOUR drive by a specified date they bill you. The drive you receive will be refurbished, but it won't have bad sectors.

--

ceraph

 

[Surfhead]

Tried that Mario, I get Bad Command or File Name message.What next?

 

[Surfhead]

So what your saying Ceraph, is that I'm screwed...All that stuff has gone to cyber heaven?

 

[ceraph]

Well, it really depends on how bad your crash was.

If your drive shows 4 gig of space free, and that was how much was free before the crash, but your windows directory is empty, then the chances are that your file table may have become corrupted.

There are a couple of things you can do, but like I said, none of these will ensure absolute stability. The only option that will ensure a clean system would be a reformat.

1. If you have a program like Norton, you can create a Rescue Disk that can try to repair the file table of your drive. Even if it does manage to repair it, the chances that you'll have corrupted files and/or lost files in deleted clusters is high.

2. You can try to reinstall Windows OVER your current installation. Win98 setup will try to read your registry before install and preserve it. I've never actually seen this be successful in retaining all important registry information -- but you may want to try it if it's your last option before a reformat.

3. You can try to just restore your boot sector as mentioned. Boot up with a Win98 System Disk, then change your directory to the ramdrive that the boot disk makes where it puts all the utils. (Usually it's the first drive letter after your last HD if you boot w/o CD support, and the last drive after your last CD if you boot w/ CD support). From here type sys c:.

In all cases you should try to copy the important files that remain on your drive to another location.

Hope this helps.

 

[Surfhead]

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to recover the data? Can I attempt to re-install windows with out formatting the drive, and hope for the best? Thanks.. Surfhead

 

[Pretender]

Unless the data is absolutely vital, I'd say forget about it. There are places which can restore data from a disk even if the file table is gone, but that's expensive. There are also a few programs which do the same, but they're expensive, and the trial versions are severly limited, and I don't remember where to get them or what they're called

So essentially, your options:

a) sys, reformat, reinstall (if your old data is unimportant)
b) try the solutions by other members
c) shell out a few hundred bucks and go to a data recovery place and hope they can recover your stuff.