Recent content by IONSystems

Whatever you do, DO NOT open up the drive. How important is the data on the drive? It needs to be RMA'd, but data still may be recovered off it. Do not attempt to power it on anymore, it will continue to corrupt the data. Chris Biggers http://www.ionsystems.net ION Systems, Computer Sales and...

I would NOT recommend using a software option for data recovery! Generally these just cause more damage and overwrite the files you are trying to recover. Hardware data recovery generally costs around $800-$1500. Chris Biggers http://www.ionsystems.net ION Systems, Computer Sales and Service...

Question: What is a USB enclosure, and why could I read the disk using one of these? Answer: Something like this http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:10501045 is what you are looking for. This device allows you to plug in any notebook hard drive in to this device, and connect it up...

*Whistles* a virus that rewrote the NVRAM would be disasterous, luckily I've never heard of such a thing. The drive would be recoverable by advanced methods, since if the NVRAM was destroyed, it could easily be restored with the help of a manufacturer and somebody with some advanced tools. (The...

If you are trying to recover the data from the supposdly bad system, I would put it in a USB enclosure and mirror it to another drive for safe keeping, or pull off any important documents etc. I know with Windows 2000, drives cannot be booted in another system - the HAL (Hardware Abstraction...

What data recovery companies did you try? I know of quite a few very good ones that can handle problems way more complex than that...they've recovered data from fires, floods, crushing...etc. What did the companies specifically say was wrong? And don't send it in to Maxtor for an RMA, they have...

If you can, or know somebody/business that can, custom building is still the best way to go. That way they can specifically fine tune a system to EXACTLY what you want, and it won't have all the garbage new systems come with. Chris Biggers http://www.ionsystems.net ION Systems, Computer Sales...

If the data recovery isn't important to you, you can always RMA the drive too and get a new (refurbished) drive out to you for just the cost of shipping it to them (about $4). You can also use the S.M.A.R.T function in BIOS, which monitors the drive and "predicts" failures. It's not...

For an XP 3000+ and FX5900, 158f is a little high, but nothing to get worried about. When your gaming, it might be heating up quite a bit though. Try dropping in a couple more fans if you can, one in the front bringing air in, then a couple in the back putting it out. That should help create...

I've had these errors with USB drives before. I believe it happens when you are trying to write/read/access large files, specifically those over 4gb. I had some problems doing some video editing on a USB hard drive (my 250gb ide hadn't come in yet), and the files it was making were around 20gb...

What exactly are you doing? Make sure none of those programs are still running in the background...I really loathe some of those programs. They'll stay in memory and cause everything (including HDD performance) to slow down. What kind of numbers are you getting before launching any applications...