Boot Disk Failure: help

Go to - http://www.datafellows.com/ this will at least rule out CIH once you've D/L the cool free proggy they have there. What brand drive. Being of the size it is it may just be near EOL. Is it making any strange noises or is there *lots* of drive activity prior to the crash.

Cheers,
Guru

You say you connected the drive to another PC which is working.Was this just to check the drive? Did the drive work on the "original" Is/was the disk formatted? PC? Any error beeps or messages? What do you mean by "run fdisk on the drive"?

If you have to salvage data on it, make sure that it's REALLY.....and I mean REALLY worth to recover.  Data recovery is NOT cheap by any means, and could cost you anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars.  We all hate to lose data......that's why you've been doing all those backups of your system......right?  (:

kannabis is right on, data recover can be very expensive...
Did you check the drive for CIH BEFORE putting it in the second computer?!!

If not check NOW!!!, well before the next attack is due anyway...
I hope you have a 3rd clean PC to download and make boot disk for CIH killer ;-)

BTW are you running any virus protetion on the PCs, if you are you can pretty much rule out CIH due to its age.

Also what date did they go down, and any other info you can supply.

cyder

What's CIH?  I thought I knew most of the alphabet soup by now, but that's a new one.

CIH is an old virus, know for stiking on the 26th April.
It can destroy MBR - ie render HDs unusable, I've heard that it may be able to damage flashable BIOSs, though I've not seen this happen.

Thanks

>>> cyderpunk >>> Just as an info source for you, check out DataFellows web site, new hits of CIH are being reported from all over. That's the only reason I mentioned it.

Cheers,
Guru

See my previous comments.Also,is the disk dedected by DOS (Fdisk)?
Without more info it's a bit early to be talking about viruses, data recovery etc.Have you tried to repair the MBR (sys)?

You may have covered all this, but just to be sure.
Does your bios auto-detect the HD at boot-up? If so, then make a clean boot disk from a clean computer (no viruses.)
Copy over the fdisk.exe (on windows 9x machines it's in c:\windows\command)write-protect the disk
boot from it, and enter fdisk /mbr
this will give your HD a new mbr.

slang9

It is possible for a drive to be detected in BIOS and still not be functional. The obvious signs to look for are strange noises coming from the drive at startup, ie, soft regular *clicking* noise, loud *clung-clung* or a wind up sound followed by a *whirr-click* sort of sound. These are signs of actuator failure, head failure is usually more obvious in that *most* of the time this will prevent the drive from being recognised. In the last few days I have had a Quantum 1.2G start to fail with some of the above sounds. Due to the age of the drive I am not overly concerned but in my case it is possible to get temporary access to my drive - long enough to ghost an image from it - by giving it a vertical "love tap", ie, hold the drive edge-wise and gently bump it on your knee - WARNING THIS CAN PERMANENTLY RENDER THE DRIVE INOPERABLE - but in my case, like I said, if I get the data off, fine, if not, that too is fine as it's only an experimantal Win2K partition. External data recovery can reach costs of $1000 per magabyte, not very economival.

Cheers,
Guru

wolle_k changed the proposed answer to a comment

Hunchback is getting plenty of comments but I still await more information.It's a bit difficult to solve a problem when one is not sure exactly what the problem is!

Can Hunchback supply more details(see my previous comments).

I see that wolle_k has changed his answer to a comment. Does this mean the question is open again?

sorry for incommunicado - not only is my HD dead but several of my neighbors are coming to see me with their PC (what do i know.. i am just a software guy - NOT hardware)

i have decided to drop the PC to the nearby techshop. If he quotes me $1000 - i am off. The next thing i 'll try is Slang's and wolle's suggestion.

I will be ever more vigilant the next time as this is the first time i have been hit by a virus. No backup no anti-virus software. Serves me right.

[why don't people with the brains spend more time earning money making good software than wasting time writing virus.. am i talking about Peter Norton?]

thanks all for your suggestions.





eriklee@hunchback

I found a better application called Mrecover and MDR. First use MRecover.
With this application you can get all your  "Drives" (D:, E:, ...) back
except the first one (C:). If you have a 32FAT you can even try to get your
C: Partition back.

After this use MDR to recover single Files from your C: Partition (without a
5 file limitation).

I hope this solves your problem :-)

You can find this applications at http://members.xoom.com/monirdomain/