PC HD Boot Problem

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Good luck with that Greg, hope most of it is backed up or not too badly corrupted. Seems now's the time to get harddrives. I picked one up off amazon for £62, 1TB Hitachi. Smart looking little thing too.
 
Thanks :) and yeah they're a lot cheaper than the last time I looked at buying one!
Now all I need is UPS to deliver the goods! Friend thinks most of the data on broken one will be OK, but yeah majority is backed up. Just frustrating waiting to get it back up & running, but these things happen from time to time I guess!
 
UPS's are a godsend, got 4 of them here as we seem to get a fair few of those 1 second drop outs which are more annoying and damaging than a normal full black out.

Have you looked into imaging your hard drive using norton ghost/acronis true image or the built in one on vista/7 pro/ultimate etc? Reinstall takes about 30 mins tops in my experience and all the progs are already installed :)
 
I'm referring to UPS the delivery company Levi? ;)

Haven't looked at that, theory is get XP installed on new HDD, then try and set the old HDD up as an additional drive and rescue the data, what stage would I try norton ghost/acronis?

Thanks,
Greg
 
oh I thought you were on about uninteruptale power supplies :)

How I would do it is this I would have 2 images one with no programs installed ie install windows, get all your drivers updates etc sorted and then image it. I would then have a second one which has all my software installed.

You then have 2 options to fall back on, say you want to install a new adobe suite but also want to clear out all the junk you've accumulated you can roll back to the first one and install just your programs and any new updates.

If you wanted to just clear the junk but keep all the programs you would roll back to the second option and then just apply any windows updates.

If you partition your drives correctly you don't even have to worry over your files as they'll be left alone - my docs etc are on a separate partition.
 
Cool thanks Levi, once I've got the new HDD setup and resuced the data from old one (if I can) I'll have a look into setting it up so one holds all my files and the other holds Windows & software :)
 
give us a shout if you get stuck with it, done it plenty of times although I'm now using the built in windows vista/7 options
 
Hmmm power-cuts. Another good reason to own a laptop really. Maybe desktops should incorporate an emergency battery so if there is a power-cut, you get 20 mins or so to save all your work and finish off and shut-down properly?
 
um a laptop to do what I do for work would last all of an hour when using the battery ignoring any life expectancy reductions due to heat issues and the extra cost (it's about twice as expensive to get a comparable laptop to a desktop equivalent). It might be ok for less stressful graphic and web design but my CAD wouldn't be worth it.

My UPS's can handle my pc's for about 20mins and weigh about 3 kilo's each so I wouldn't want that in my case (not that I could fit it in anywhere)

For me personally laptop's are great for showing clients my work but for me to work purely with them is financially unsound.
 
I had what sounds like a similar problem with my SATA drive when I first installed it, but as yours has previously worked it doesnt sound like the same problem.

Because Ive got an ata drive in there as well I had to change the jumpers on the old drive to make the sata one even show up.
 
I would have said cmos battery worth a try as well, maybe a silly question, but did you remove the power lead and reset the cmos via jumper as well after putting in new battery?

I had a problemn with a pc at work, where a sata hd was installed and it kept failing to boot. i couldnt work out how to fix it so i messed about with bios and found that changing storage controller to ide worked. but it wasnt recognising hd in bios at all at first so prob not gonna work in your case and slightly random..
 
Thanks for replies guys, found out it was a boot sector virus, usually starts on a external disk/drive and then infects your hard drive and specifically the boot sector. Think it must have started way back when I posted my previous PC problem (with the external HDD putting itself as first in order of the boot menu before the hard drive). Ended up getting a new desktop yesterday as was due an upgrade anyway, getting everything set up on new machine then will try and retrieve the data from old HDD before re-formatting it and then hopefully using it as a spare drive for storage.
 
yeah i've never come across one though


have you typo?


what about you chris?


what about you jimlad?


hmm
 
back in the late 90s maybe.. but not in the last few years :lol:
 
Back in the day...I have had a Mac hard drive kaput and a mother board fry
G4 Tower and Power Mac Preforma 630

630 scrapped and G4 fixed and still going I believe.
 
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