Hard drive failure/motherboard failure?

[Bugsy_malone 666]

unfortunatly I dont, you are coming up with some great ideas though, keep em coming!

[Mickha]

You could try loading Windows 98 on your 80 GB hard drive, as a second Operating System, using FAT 32, or use another old hard drive, then hook it up as Master and Slave to that and see if that can read the second hard drive.
You should be able to read something from the hard drive as it is recognised in the BIOS.
In the very old days I seem to remember using DOS commands to copy data from one hard drive to another.
Try searching the internet to for old DOS commands then all you have to do is boot up from an old Floppy boot up disk and see if you can access the drive.
If your computer hasn't got a floppy drive, internal or external, I think a Windows 98 SE disk gives you the DOS option.

[Bugsy_malone 666]

Ok, bit of an update.

so far its day 3 or 4 and the 80gb seems fine and dandy still, but the 250gb hard drive is still in accessable - by windows.

few weeks ago when I first started having hard drive issues with the hard drive I replaced (the 80gb that was my entire computer that started clicking) and the new 250gb I downloaded a piece of software called stella phoenix, its a demo version but you can check the contents of the drive.

now when i had an issue with the 250gb the first time round it was because I`d formated the 250gb to FAT32 and then told the PC it was NTFS and then i started playing with more than I could understand and buggered up the file system, setting stella phoenix on deep scan of the physical drive found all the files although unless you bought the full product you couldnt retrieve files larger than 64k, I then bit the bullet and formatted the drive as NTFS and its been fine for about 3 weeks. I still have that installed and tried it on the 250gb again but this time selected logical drive which it couldnt read before, it read the drive like windows would, very quickly and could see all the files.

Judging by this im guessing there is some sort of file system error again, question is what can i do to repair it?

this still doesnt explain why last weekend the hard drive lights stayed on full for 5 minutes and why my network lights BOTH stay illuminated even when the PC is off?


thanks for all your help guys its much appreciated, I know a reasonable amount about things but this is getting very techy above my normal station!

[Wheeler777]

I had the same problem with a 160gb drive some time ago, accessing the drive was not possible, what i did was a low level format with the manufacturers own utility maxblast4 the drive sprang back to life and is still going now at least 2 years later, the data was lost but the drive is still working flawlessly, keep trying to recover the data but when all else has failed its an option to save the drive. all manufacturers usually provide a similar utility. gl.

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