----------------------------------- Delos Wed Dec 22, 2004 12:36 pm Devasted harddrive...help? ----------------------------------- sure would like to know what the hell happened... R.I.P....oh wait, I never did give it a name. Hmm...it seems to have done that on its own accord! R.I.P. tMÅú$#╞][7_ ----------------------------------- MihaiG Wed Dec 22, 2004 12:43 pm ----------------------------------- try de-fragmenting... or formating orr stop downloading p*** *joke*.... have you tried taking ur harddisk and throwing at a passing by car becauswe if those don't work ur scre***....did you do any downloads and upgrade prior to the hardisk failure?? ----------------------------------- Maverick Wed Dec 22, 2004 12:49 pm ----------------------------------- Just Format it.... ----------------------------------- MihaiG Wed Dec 22, 2004 1:13 pm ----------------------------------- like i said... ----------------------------------- Mazer Wed Dec 22, 2004 3:32 pm ----------------------------------- If that doesn't work, start checking for a warranty from the manufacturer. Just last summer my Maxtor drive died on me (recovered most files thanks to a live Linux distro) and I just went to their website for warranty info. They let you download a program to make a boot disk that will run tests on the hard drive to make sure that it is indeed failing and then will give you a code you can send to them with some forms and the faulty hard drive to replace. It'll probably be similar for most other companies, I guess. But that's just to get your old drive back. Here's something that could cheer you up nicely: [url=http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=423018&sku=THD-2000JB%20P]new hard drive, yay! ----------------------------------- Drakain Zeil Wed Dec 22, 2004 4:16 pm ----------------------------------- It sounds to me like you have physical problems with your drive. Somthing may have been knocked free of it's position, or some one opened the drive's house plates to "take a look." Small bits of dist, and other misc. things can cause these problems, extream temperatures I've heard too. However, there is hope for your drive yet. This would be very easy if you had the installation disks for Mandrake Linux since it has a nice, free part/format tool. Basicly, what you need to do is destroy all of anything on your harddisk, remove all partitions, make the entire drive into one, format that, remove it, then put back a windows part. Now, as for saving any data... well, you could *try* backing up some things with it loaded as a slave. I doubt this would affect your master in any way... unless some one has made some very crippeling virus not yet known.[/i] ----------------------------------- Hikaru79 Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:07 pm ----------------------------------- I would grab a copy of the Knoppix-STD tool: http://www.knoppix-std.org/ Then use that to see if you can't recover most of your stuff. Perhaps one of the tools on there will even fix whatever issue you had. At the very least, you won't lose any important data. Then, reformat. And get a [url=http://ubuntulinux.org]real OS ;) ----------------------------------- Delos Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:49 pm ----------------------------------- Thanx for the suggestions everyone...though it appears that my little ol' harddrive has been shot a couple miles beyond hell this time. To put into perspective what I mean...currently the FAT structure is listed as "8FAT 32". Yup, you read that correctly... In retrospect, there's not much on it to recover - sure I had those ~30 GBs of animé lying around, but I had watched most of it...(Almost up to date w/ Naruto! Yay.) And since semester just finished, I won't need any of that school work...[sigh]. It's gonna take a while to put it all back together - assuming this formatting works...at last check, Norton Disk Doctor couldn't figure out what the drive was - apparently it wasn't "configured properly". As for the real OS...perhaps I will give it a try...damn Windows keeps screwing my over... ----------------------------------- Drakain Zeil Wed Dec 22, 2004 11:43 pm ----------------------------------- Keep in mind that linux takes a while to get used to, it's harder to configure then windows is, but you can configure more. ----------------------------------- Hikaru79 Thu Dec 23, 2004 1:53 am ----------------------------------- It's a whole different paradigm, but one that is a whole lot easier to get used to than most make it out to be. There's quite a few threads by those considering the switch to Linux. Me and wtd are currently campaigning for [url=http://ubuntulinux.org]Ubuntu Linux, but Mandrake is also easy for a first-timer. Just stay away from Slackware or even pure Debian. Here's some GD Linux threads: http://www.compsci.ca/v2/viewtopic.php?t=7037 http://www.compsci.ca/v2/viewtopic.php?t=6367