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PC won't boot! Have I lost everything?

GarfieldLeChat said:
yes the back up cd will do it... but don't use it on your old disk...
Click to expand...

Yep, new hard disk

Also, Jusali, when you get to the point of copying across files - don't just copy across everything! I know it might seem obvious but you really don't want to be copying across the old disk's Windows files for example.
 
cesare said:
Incidentally, on one of the times this happened to me, I couldn't slave the data across from having the drive in the box - but it worked when I put the drive into an external drive box, for some obscure reason.
Click to expand...

jumpers... CS slave Master...
 
I am intrigued by this Ubuntu 8.04 liveCD.
Means I could get rescuing tonight.
Say I just google it burn a cd here at work and then set up the bios back home to boot from cd yeah?
The ubuntu/linux system is residing then in my ram? the cd? and I can then view my HD from there aswell as an external USB drive? I can then copy across all the photo's documents and pron ;) to my external drive? Then remove Hard drive sledge hammer it and get a new internal Hard drive and re-install the operating system using that DVD I burnt roight?
 
jusali said:
I am intrigued by this Ubuntu 8.04 liveCD.
Means I could get rescuing tonight.
Say I just google it burn a cd here at work and then set up the bios back home to boot from cd yeah?
The ubuntu/linux system is residing then in my ram? the cd? and I can then view my HD from there aswell as an external USB drive? I can then copy across all the photo's documents and pron ;) to my external drive? Then remove Hard drive sledge hammer it and get a new internal Hard drive and re-install the operating system using that DVD I burnt roight?
Click to expand...

Try a Puppy 4 one as well. You might find it easier to use as it is just as powerful but only need about 128mb of ram to run. You just use the mount icon third top left. Then hit mount followed by the file button and drag and drop. It also has Gparted to attempt to fix the drive.

http://www.puppylinux.org/
 
cesare said:
*remembers numerous attempts to burn a bootable CD*
Click to expand...

Wrong software maybe? I have burnt approx. 50 bootable disks in the last two years and only one has failed. It is so reliable that never think about checksum or worry that it is not going to work. It is as easy as copying a file in some software.
 
stowpirate said:
Wrong software maybe? I have burnt approx. 50 bootable disks in the last two years and only one has failed. It is so reliable that never think about checksum or worry that it is not going to work. It is as easy as copying a file in some software.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it was the software. Nero was rubbish for burning ISOs. It was fine once I'd downloaded and used CDburnerXP
 
jusali said:
I am intrigued by this Ubuntu 8.04 liveCD.
Means I could get rescuing tonight.
Say I just google it burn a cd here at work and then set up the bios back home to boot from cd yeah?
The ubuntu/linux system is residing then in my ram? the cd? and I can then view my HD from there aswell as an external USB drive? I can then copy across all the photo's documents and pron ;) to my external drive? Then remove Hard drive sledge hammer it and get a new internal Hard drive and re-install the operating system using that DVD I burnt roight?
Click to expand...

tbh why?

you have a disk which will fail immentently and will kill off all data on it when it does. The more it's spun or played around with trying things which you are uncertain of or need to write a cache to the disk even if it's as in a live cd a tempory one which will be deleted on shut down you are still spinning your broken limping on shortly to die disk...

the only real time you want to do this is as you are pulling off the data from it, so you can save it as much as possilbe.

Get another disk reinstall stick this old disk as a slave and pull all your data off and don't piss around with live cd's on a system you have no experince of in order to attempt to do something whcih might kill of the remaining life cycle of your dyding disk...

If the data is that important to you be senisble and don't do something out of your depth...
 
jusali said:
I am intrigued by this Ubuntu 8.04 liveCD.
Means I could get rescuing tonight.
Say I just google it burn a cd here at work and then set up the bios back home to boot from cd yeah? ...
Click to expand...
Yeah.
The ubuntu/linux system is residing then in my ram? the cd? and I can then view my HD from there as well as an external USB drive?
Click to expand...
Yeah, the ram. Your machine will need, say 512MB or more RAM.
I can then copy across all the photo's documents and pron ;) to my external drive?
Click to expand...
Yeah, plug in an external USB dive and an icon will appear on the desktop OK.
Then remove Hard drive sledge hammer it and get a new internal Hard drive and re-install the operating system using that DVD I burnt roight?
Click to expand...
Right! :)
 
GarfieldLeChat said:
tbh why?

you have a disk which will fail immentently and will kill off all data on it when it does. The more it's spun or played around with trying things which you are uncertain of or need to write a cache to the disk even if it's as in a live cd a tempory one which will be deleted on shut down you are still spinning your broken limping on shortly to die disk...

the only real time you want to do this is as you are pulling off the data from it, so you can save it as much as possilbe.

Get another disk reinstall stick this old disk as a slave and pull all your data off and don't piss around with live cd's on a system you have no experince of in order to attempt to do something whcih might kill of the remaining life cycle of your dyding disk...

If the data is that important to you be senisble and don't do something out of your depth...
Click to expand...

This, this, this.

You don't know when it's going to completely fail, Jusali.
 
I thought Jusali's plan is to rescue the data, get a new hard drive, and reinstall windows.

He says he will "get a new internal Hard drive and re-install the operating system".
 
Jonti said:
I thought Jusali's plan is to rescue the data, get a new hard drive, and reinstall windows.

He says he will "get a new internal Hard drive and re-install the operating system".
Click to expand...

I think Garf's point is that rescuing the data by way of possibly putting the already failing hard drive under even more pressure, might not be the best thing to do. Especially because he doesn't need to.
 
Let's jus get this straight.

1. This has probably happened cos my drive is dying?
2. Thus I will need a new internal hard drive.
3. I want to rescue my pictures documents etc
4. I can do this in 2 ways,
a)install new hard drive with new operating system then slave old hard drive and copy to new system.
b)Get a boot cd system that works in a solid state way residing in my ram and then using that software harvest all above data to my external hard drive
5.There is some confusion as to which way is best but in my mind I'm thinking pulling out a failing hard drive and then rewiring it to be a slave is a little bit more stressful for the drive than using the solid state RAM (lets say) puppylinux to harvest the data or is the puppylinux gonna be utilising the harddisk?
 
GarfieldLeChat said:
tbh why?

you have a disk which will fail immentently and will kill off all data on it when it does. The more it's spun or played around with trying things which you are uncertain of or need to write a cache to the disk even if it's as in a live cd a tempory one which will be deleted on shut down you are still spinning your broken limping on shortly to die disk...
Click to expand...

I understand what you are saying but is this not speculation? Most disks do not really fail just get corrupted to a point where you cannot read the data. In thirty years of using computers on a daily basis I have only once seen a complete hard disk failure and that made a horrible noise. I have seen loads of disks just fail because of corrupted data. Just recently my son bought a laptop from a car boot sale with a defunct disk for peanuts. A quick boot a Linux CD restored the file system and then a scandisk and defrag and he had a fully working healthy laptop.

Not all Live distros use the hard disk? In Puppy if you use the pfix=ram command it ignores the HD - it might have a quick look see but not actually mount it. If you do a normal boot and your HD has a Linux swap file in place it will attempt to use it - but this HD probably never had a Linux install?

GarfieldLeChat said:
If the data is that important to you be senisble and don't do something out of your depth...
Click to expand...

There is nothing difficult in mounting a HD and drag and drop. If it does not work you can try something else like scanning the disk and fixing any errors. then attempt to mount it again.
 
cesare said:
I think Garf's point is that rescuing the data by way of possibly putting the already failing hard drive under even more pressure, might not be the best thing to do. Especially because he doesn't need to.
Click to expand...

that's the sausage.

basically there's a least risky and a most risky way of doing it, now If you are like me and have copoius back ups of back ups of back ups on raids in seperate places on the planet etc that it will be a faff to recollate them to restore the machine with all this data then go for it chose the risky option you can always get back your data from another source.

howeve few people have access to their own raid server back ups tapes and off site copies... this would be considered obsseive by some...

in which case minimal risk is thw way forward cos once it goes or 'pops' then it's around £100 per gig to recover professionally... which makes 10 gig almost economically unviable to recover... and you cannot at that point guarentee the money will get you the data back you wanted or what state it'll be in when you do get it back... (and if it's a platter burn through rather than a reading head failure then you will definately not have anything to recover in that sector)

Imagine it like this which is kinda what it's like.

You have a 33 lp record in viynal you know it jumps halfway through track 2 and it always jumps to track 4 you cannot due to the scratch on the record make it play track 3 however you can put a pound coin on the reading arm to weigh it down to read straight from track 2 through to track 4 including track 3 but every time you do this it visablly scores out a little bit of viynal wearing the groove deeper each time and reducing the quality of the audio on each occasion which is already marred by the click every 33 seconds when the needle is forced over the scratch.

this is what you are doing to your disk sooner or later you record will stop playing all the sounds in the frequency range (basically where you're at now) and shortly after this it will cease to play any sound in this area at all or simply become so worn it reverts to permentanly skipping or have wonr through to the other side... either way the orginal item on that sector will be destroyied as the song would be on the record...

so do the sensible thing stick a new disk in there rebuild the machine and then and only then stcik your old disk in as a slave copy everythign off (prefferably after sticking the disk in a freezer bag and in the deep freeze over night (this will contract the vaculm inside the disk and pull everythign together which might be the difference between pulling all data off and most of it) and then plug it all in and strip it then never touch it again...
 
Heh, yeah Garf I'm also one of those off-site back-up obsessed people, but I was just too mean to pay for a restore :D (plus, I'd been working for a few hours since the last back-up).

Coincidentally, at the same time that the one that I was talking about started to crash, I turned on one that I just used for a very specific purpose. Wouldn't even recognise that a hard drive was there let alone attempt to boot it. That was no big issue though because I had the data backed up. I might try that Linux thing to see if I can do anything with it now though, got nothing to lose and I'd quite like to have a machine running Linux to experiment with/learn from (not going to do that on one that I'm working with :D).
 
OK, going on the slave route then. New hard disk then try and pull the data off the failed one as a slave. Will I need to change stuff someone mentioned jumpers etc wTF?
My brain hurts
 
jusali said:
I can't run chkdisk anyway :(
Click to expand...

Well, you probably can - it's in the link that I gave you back at #3 :D But as I said back then, repairing is only temporary, it's going to go anyway you just don't know when.

Get one of those Gizmos Swarfy mentioned (that I used) then you don't have to worry about the master/slave thing - you can just copy the data across.
 
cesare said:
Well, you probably can - it's in the link that I gave you back at #3 :D But as I said back then, repairing is only temporary, it's going to go anyway you just don't know when.

Get one of those Gizmos Swarfy mentioned (that I used) then you don't have to worry about the master/slave thing - you can just copy the data across.
Click to expand...

We do not really know the full situation. If you repair the drive it could flag up a few bad clusters or nothing at at all either way it could continue working for year. If you get the drive going you can back up your important data. Then maybe add another partitions one to mirror your data so that if you have further corruption in the short term you can try to mount the other partition. Resize the first partition with your existing OS after doing a full defrag and scandisk a couple of times!! Sorry talking about using Linux again and how I do things!
 
stowpirate said:
I understand what you are saying but is this not speculation? Most disks do not really fail just get corrupted to a point where you cannot read the data. In thirty years of using computers on a daily basis I have only once seen a complete hard disk failure and that made a horrible noise. I have seen loads of disks just fail because of corrupted data. Just recently my son bought a laptop from a car boot sale with a defunct disk for peanuts. A quick boot a Linux CD restored the file system and then a scandisk and defrag and he had a fully working healthy laptop.

Not all Live distros use the hard disk? In Puppy if you use the pfix=ram command it ignores the HD - it might have a quick look see but not actually mount it. If you do a normal boot and your HD has a Linux swap file in place it will attempt to use it - but this HD probably never had a Linux install?
Click to expand...

turning on the machine spins what in order to find the boot partition on what in order to select boot order.

by doing this you are sending the read head accross the disk in order to detect this regardless of what you then do or boot into. this will increase disk wear on a failing piece of technology and also could further corrupt the data remaining.

It's not that i wouldn't do it, or have come accross your sons experince before and had many a working machine by that way it's just that in cases where the principal aim is to recover your own data to the point you are satisfied you have saved everything you want or need then i wouldn't run the risk.

after all the cost be damned at this point it's the data which is priceless.

less time you have to imminent failure the less chance of losing it.

better safe than sorry in these instances.

and for refference at work we've lost around 80 disks in our set ups over the years from servers which are on a more constant grind that home pc's and had many failures of the desktops to the point where we now have enough carcusses to maintain the remaining stock and refurb at will.

just because it hasn't happened to you in your enviroment isn't an indicator that it won't happen to others and as i've said it the data rather than the cost which is the factor here.

so yes i guess it's specutaltion but informed and cautionary speculation rather than it being unbound.

stowpirate said:
There is nothing difficult in mounting a HD and drag and drop. If it does not work you can try something else like scanning the disk and fixing any errors. then attempt to mount it again.
Click to expand...

again all of which is spinning an ailing disk and could cause further corruption, damage or make it simply stop working.

why do that when the alternative is much simpler and kinder to the OP to just replace and copy over that way guarentteeing the data is saved.
 
stowpirate said:
What other OS can you actually boot on broken system with a proper GUI and has the tools to possibly fix the problem?



The same goes for any tools in a situation like this? Obviously you want to avoid formating the drive or deleting anything but if you do a little research before you start you should be OK.

Have you actually used Linux recently - command line voodoo is a thing of the past?
Click to expand...

I think you're missing my point. There's nothing wrong with linux as any number of evangelists will testify. But during the course of this thread jusali has been advised to:
#4 use knoppix
#7 use Puppy Linux & Gparted
#13 use Ubuntu liveCD
#14 will #13 work? use Mint Linux
#16 need to know about console/sudo/mount stuff
#22 & #27 yes #13 will work, just do this
#36 maybe puppy 4 is better
and then we get to #47 where he asks "what's mounting"?

Of course the tools you're suggesting work and in the right hands and with some understanding of partitions, filesystems and so on, there is a possibility that the drive might be resurrected.

But this is important data with no backup and a Windows only user. The advice about linux- and the discussion about versions and capabilities- is all doubtless correct: I was questioning whether it was appropriate for this thread. An unfamiliar user only needs small language/concept differences or a single incomprehensible error message to pop up to become very confused. sudo, mount, permission denied... you (& I) will be unphased but is it really fair to expect someone else to pick it all up and run with it first time on important, one-off data?

I'm not knocking linux in any way
 
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