Hard Drive Crash

[Guest_imported]

I have a situation where my gf's computer crash really hard. When they went to reboot scandisk ran and said that there was problems with all I repeat all the files so the user went through fixing them all...... Now when they start the computer they get an error saying "non system disk error etc. etc." They do not have a system disk so I brought mine over to use. I can't seem to get onto the hard drive to look around though, and I can re partion, format anything to the hard drive...... I am at a total loss please help.

Brian Harris
mountain..man@home.com

 

[mhughes]

Sounds like the hard drive has passed away.

 

[teknoguy]

who makes the hard drive?
if it's a western digital i wouldn't be supprised. ive seen
too many western digital drive failures. very flakey.

does the bios still see the hard drive?

when you go into dos with a boot disk. type c:
if theres nothing there you might as well take the drive apart and use the platters as wind chimes.

 

[jgoodman00]

Whilst I have never tried it, as a last resort you could try low-level formatting it. This does of course assume the bios recognises the hard disk.. James Goodman
j.goodman00@btinternet.com

 

[Guest_imported]

The Bios does recognize the hand drive...... but when I type c: wont let me access it.... sounds to me like I might have some new coasters when I take the drive apart...

Thanks to all who responded so quickly..
Brian

 

[mhughes]

You can put it in the freezer for a couple hours then try to get data off until it heats up again. Works sometimes.

 

[swayda]

You have given nearly enough information. If she's running Windows 95/98/CE it sounds as if there is something wrong with the disk partition or master boot record. If you are booting from a floppy and it was created with a system using the 16 bit FAT and she's running the VFAT32 you won't even see the hard drive. You require a boot floppy created with a system using VFAT32. Once you get one you boot and run fdisk. Make sure the active partition is set . If that doesn't help try rebooting with the floppy and run the following.
fdisk /mbr. Get back if that doesn't work.