Home PC has gone belly up, bit of a numptie so wondering if theres anything i can do. On power up everything appears as normal, through BIOS (?) etc right up until i would expect the hard drive to start spinning to load up Windows (XP Pro). Hard disk does spin, (light comes on) but it doesn't sound right, and stops after about 5 seconds leaving me with a blank monitor. Safe mode etc doesn't help. Its been like it since thursday, tried repeated reboots, disconnected and removed HD, put it back, nothing. Any suggestions or does it appear terminal.

TIA

Adam

Connect you HDD to another computer, IE add your drive as an additional drive on another PC and see if you can get it to spin up. If not I'd say your HDD has failed, sounds that way to me....so you'll need to be getting your data from your latest backup

You did have a backup right? :)



[Edited by iDLe* - 10/20/2003 1:03:27 PM]

right, ur hdd, does it spin up when u turn the power on when its doin the bios check? if so and bios detects it but makes weird noises when tryin to get into windows, run a dos version of scandisk there is a copy on win98 cd which u can boot from and leave it to do a full surface scan (may take a while) then try it

Backup hmmmm theres a thought!!

Bios does recognise the hard disk is there, i got a copy of the Win98 system disk, and was gonna run scandisk and chkdisk, but couldn't get the command prompt to go to C drive. Typed cd C: thinking that would do it (not hot on DOS), it produced a line in DOS says C: but immidiately underneath went back to A: again.

You should be able to do something like chkdsk C:

You don't need to actually change to the relevant drive first.

Also, you just need to type C:, not cd C:\. All the latter does is change the current directory on drive C: to root (\) without actually changing you to drive C:


[Edited by Hanslow - 10/20/2003 1:36:02 PM]

cd is change directory. just type C:
althogh you shouldnt have to if that floppy has scan disk on it. if scandisk is in the root of the floppy just type

(prompt should look like) A:\scandisk c: <<<type it like that it will do a scan of the c drive

fantastic 2 people posting the same thing at the same time. I'm easily amused...

Thanks for the advice.

I'll give it a go when i get home

LOL @ Hobo :D

Can't be bad two people giving the same advice ;)

:D

Had this myself lastweek, SATA Raptor, tried recovery console etc but turned out to be terminal :(

Just to say, thank feck for Norton Ghost :D

Scandisk? Surely this will not work if the volume is ntfs?

Still stand by my original post = HDD is dead!