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I'm typing this from my iPod as my computer is now reader than yesterday's fried chicken. Looks like my hard drive just gave out & it won't boot. So no more working from home, no WoW, no Civ V and there goes all my files - including all the VoiceOver work I just did for an RPG. Wonderful.

DAMN. Thats no good. Any chance you can get the files recovered by a professional?

Espy said:

DAMN. Thats no good. Any chance you can get the files recovered by a professional?

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Working on it now. Looks like it crashed hard, though.

Espy said:

DAMN. Thats no good. Any chance you can get the files recovered by a professional?

Click to expand...

It's possible depending on what exactly happened to the drive, but that shit is expensive.

Shit, Dave. I'm really sorry to hear that.

This sounds like a job for Matt or patrthom.

I'm sorry to hear it Dave.

If it won't boot, could it be the power supply?

Yeah, plugging the HD into another computer would be a good test. Has it been making any noise lately?

Can you boot to safe mode or a CD-ROM? Or slave it to another drive and access your files that way? Hopefully, if it is hd-related, it's just the boot sector that is screwy.

Either way, that royally sucks, man. Really sorry to hear that.

Can we start a fund drive for a new pc now?

PCT said:

Can we start a fund drive for a new pc now?

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Nah. For most stuff I hope the wife will not mind that I commandeer her laptop. But there's no other PC in the house with a graph accelerator so games are out of the question.

I'm going to grab either a new HD and stick it in or see if I can get this one to read on another comp. But retrieving files professionally is very pricey and I won't go that route. Only real thing of value I think I lost was the VoiceOver stuff and I can record those again.

If possible when you get the drive replaced get a second one as well (or an external drive) have one smaller primary drive that just has the OS installed on it and have the secondary drive be for all your data. That way if the OS goes harakiri or the drive explodes you still have your data on a secondary drive you can slave in to another machine.

Also for replacement drives I recommend Seagate brand. I have been in love with those since the day I was in the lab and saw a seagate drive fall out of a test box, smack on the bench, and keep working without skipping a beat.

Oh nooooo. That's terrible. I'm so sorry, Dave!

Driversavers can get stuff back (documents and files) for between $900-2300. (yeah, not cheap... and that IS the cheaper of their services)

If it's been making ANY kinda clicking noise, DO NOT TRY TO POWER IT UP! ... let a pro try it. For God's sake, do NOT take it to Best Buy!
If not, you can try hooking it up as a slave.. if the computer doesn't boot past the bios (or times out) then yeah, the board on it is fried.

Next time your computer dies and you decide to swear a lot at it, do it on Skype. I know someone who loves that

I know your pain, Dave. I am still working off my laptop after my computer gave out.

And that's why i back up all my important data... which reminds me, i need to the new pics backed up...

I attached this to another PC last night and it isn't even being recognized as being a drive. Bodes not too well. Booted up my external backup drive and it showed the last successful copy was....April. No error messages. So I thought this whole time I was doing backups, which is why I didn't panic and didn't curse too loudly. I expected to buy a new HD and restore everything. And now that seems to be out the window.

To quote Woody, "This is a perfect time to panic!"

Dave said:

I attached this to another PC last night and it isn't even being recognized as being a drive. Bodes not too well. Booted up my external backup drive and it showed the last successful copy was....April. No error messages. So I thought this whole time I was doing backups, which is why I didn't panic and didn't curse too loudly. I expected to buy a new HD and restore everything. And now that seems to be out the window.

To quote Woody, "This is a perfect time to panic!"

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Yeah, the board on it is fried. I would like to know, what brand is it, size?

If you're VERY exact, and I mean you gotta match EVERYTHING, model, series, size, etc, you can get an exact drive and swap circuit boards over and then attempt recovery, but that also is risky.. still, it's the cost of a hard drive.

Dave, sometimes i wonder why "god" hates you so much

Matt² said:

Yeah, the board on it is fried. I would like to know, what brand is it, size?

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Yeah, I figured that. I'm going to go pick up a new HD today and if I have enough $$ a copy of Win7. It's the Win7 that's going to be expensive. The problem is I found my Win7 upgrade disk but can't locate my Vista disks. So I would either have to pirate something (which I don't like to do) or buy new - which I don't like to do considering.

Really the only thing I hate is the fact that my backup has been saving 0 byte deltas since April and I never bothered to look at it because I was getting a backup complete message.

Math242 said:

Dave, sometimes i wonder why "god" hates you so much

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I do, too. If there is a God he's a jerk.

There's no difference between the actual software on the upgrade disk versus the "full" disk of Win7 - the difference is in the license key. If you still have access to the vista license key on the disk, packaging, or computer usually), then you should still be able to do a "custom upgrade" (same as what you have to do if you have XP), and MS support should be able to help you if you have problems.

That really sucks Dave

Just got a 500gb for $30 from Craigslist (temporary solution) and an OEM copy of Win7 Premium.

Wish me luck.

This thread made me have a dream.

I dreamt I was driving my car and kept hearing a clicking/rattling sound, so I wondered if my HD was going bad, or if I was dragging something.

doomdragon6 said:

I dreamt I was driving my car and kept hearing a clicking/rattling sound, so I wondered if my HD was going bad

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The funny part about this is that I'd been hearing a rattle. I took the PC apart and discovered that my fan was going bad. I hadn't replaced it yet so it the HD was making rattling noises I probably attributed it to the fan.

Good luck.

Good luck brother!

I have never successfully "transplant" a HDD via changing out the board cause it is a pain in the butt to find the exact model of it

Now-a-days I just use raid 5 or 10.

Dave said:

Yeah, I figured that. I'm going to go pick up a new HD today and if I have enough $$ a copy of Win7. It's the Win7 that's going to be expensive. The problem is I found my Win7 upgrade disk but can't locate my Vista disks. So I would either have to pirate something (which I don't like to do) or buy new - which I don't like to do considering

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For future reference, it is possible to do a fresh install of Windows 7 without upgrading from Vista. It takes some jumping through hoops, and possibly some registry editing, but it can be done.

---------- Post added at 02:17 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:15 PM ----------

Oh, and I remember when my last PC died. I spent the next week doing most of my web surfing on my Wii (with keyboard attached), I even did most of my part shopping for my currrent computer on the Wii. Such a pain in the ass.

I'm sorry man. Last month the family's computer actually started smoking (I thought we'd raised it better than that). We just replaced the power supply and everything worked fine again. Too bad you can't have such a simple solution.

I got a computer in last night that has multiple problems:
cpu fan so caked with DIRT (not just dust) that it killed the CPU fan;
Ditto with the power supply fan, though for the moment it (the power supply itself) works but is remaining shut off until it's replacement arrives Friday;
Whatever power surge was also involved in killing the cpu fan also killed one of the sticks of Patriot memory;
Unrelated to either problem, BOTH DVD drives were sealed shut by an unknown substance that spilled into the computer (likely Sprite or similar soda), dried and sealed both cd's to the plastic "clamp" armature (not sure what it's called) inside each drive. Neither could open because the discs would not release the clamp, which needed to go down, and the manual release with a paperclip option, failed outright because of it - I had to manually disassemble both drives completely and apply goo begone goo remover to get rid of the stickiness, and also to the cd's so they wouldn't get stuck again.

Dave this is seriously gonna hamper Corin Direbrew runs this week. Just sayin.

I wish it were that easy, Girlfriend, but stuff like that usually requires the services such as that rendered by Drivesavers. Usually complete, but not very cheap. Best bet is to restore from whatever backup you have, then make a new backup and continue on (making backups as you go).

Seriously, folks. Make backups. Hopefully you'll never have to use them, but having even one can make such a difference. My main Mac and PC each use a RAID1 for security, and the Mac backs up via Time Machine to a separate external RAID1. I got stuff I just can't afford to lose, and I don't intend to. Yes, throwing 4 drives at it is a little expensive (about $500 all told), but that's still less than a quarter of the price it could be from a place like Drivesavers. Money well spent, indeed.

--Patrick

Okay, here's what I have now:

C: - HD that has crashed and I need to recover information.
F: - HD that added.

I have downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 and have it burned to a disk, but I can't get the system to boot from this disk. I CAN get the computer to boot up using the C: drive, but it freezes after a short period of time.

So what do I need to do? Should I remove the C: drive and then try and load the .iso file from Ubuntu ad I think it's still trying to access the C: drive?

This damned thing is driving me fricking nuts.

I had the Ubuntu disk burned as data, not the way I needed it to be. Loading Ubuntu right now. Maybe I'll have a computer soon!

Posting this from my computer. YAY!!

Ubuntu sucks, though. Everything is difficult and there is no dual monitor support so I have 1 dead monitor. Beautiful. Next step? Power down, plug back in the other drive and back everything up onto the new drive. Then I can work on getting Win7 and remove Ubuntu, plus get a new HD to make primary.

But I need to try and find some way to be able to log in to my work so I can work from home. Stay tuned!

so... time to change this from [fail] to [win] yet?

Not quite yet. But I'm getting closer. Booted back up and am starting to try and find the files I want to move over.

Well, so much for that. Crashity-crash. Now Ubuntu won't even load. Le sigh.

figmentPez said:

For future reference, it is possible to do a fresh install of Windows 7 without upgrading from Vista. It takes some jumping through hoops, and possibly some registry editing, but it can be done.

Click to expand...

What hoops would one have to jump through. I've been having issues with my computer. I did an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. I have the Windows 7 discs from when we changed my wife's computer over from Vista. Would I not be able to simply install windows 7 using the retail install we bought as an overwrite on this hard drive and then use my current windows 7 key to make it work?

KCWM said:

What hoops would one have to jump through. I've been having issues with my computer. I did an upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. I have the Windows 7 discs from when we changed my wife's computer over from Vista. Would I not be able to simply install windows 7 using the retail install we bought as an overwrite on this hard drive and then use my current windows 7 key to make it work?

Click to expand...

The Windows 7 Upgrade install key won't allow it to be input on a fresh installation, I don't think. One method to get around this is to do a fresh install (even from the upgrade disc) and skip entering a key when it asks (you get a week or something to enter a key and validate), and then do an "upgrade" from Win7 to Win7. Another method involves editing the registry, and let me see if I can find that one... Ah ha! I thought we'd talked about this on the forum before. Here it is: Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media

It's worth noting (for folks who didn't click on the link), that the "double" install method is actually a Microsoft supported solution for people with legitimate copies of Windows XP/Vista who can't, for w/e reason, do an in-place upgrade installation.

I found out today that my desktop's processor fan is dead. I found this out when it suddenly shut down in the middle of playing Dragon Age. Must have overheated. No wires are damaged, I blew out all the dust that had accumulated and it still would not start up when the system was turned back on. So tomorrow I get to go buy a new fan.

Moved to Tech Talk due to my now starting to ask a lot of questions.

Never used Ubuntu before so excuse me if this is stupid, but....

I have this on a 500 GB HD and the WHOLE DRIVE is being taken up by the fucking OS. Even though the OS only needs like 10 GB, I have a part of my partition that reads as "Unknown" and /dev/sda1....and won't allow me to write anything to it. I found where I can edit the partition, but it won't let me change the label and I have no idea what TYPE to make it! And should it remain "bootable"?

This is more trouble than it's worth!

The whole drive probably isn't taken up by the OS, it's maybe just formatted in a linux file system just like Windows formats the entire drive in NTFS. Here is a tutorial on the Ubuntu partition manager. I'd suggest booting into the live CD and running it from there. If you want to be able to access the left over part of the drive in windows, make it NTFS. Don't change the bootable flag.

If you can post a screenshot of the partition manager so we can see what you have set up, it may help.

I changed that portion to NTFS and now the whole thing won't boot. ARGH!

Well, if you changed the portion of the drive that the OS was installed on it would do that.

I believe by default Ubuntu creates 2 partitions. One is just "/" and is your root partition, the one that the OS is located. The other is "/swap", you won't ever touch that. If you reinstall, you can do a manual configure on your partitions and set your "/" partition to 12 gig, and your "/swap" to 2 gig. For the rest of it make an NTFS partition.

---------- Post added at 10:27 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:17 AM ----------

Here's another deal on how to set up the partitions. It has a bit more detail on what you need.

Sorry, Dave. Ubuntu is one of those things I haven't learned yet. Good luck, though...and as soon as you get anything to show up anywhere for any length of time whatsoever...MAKE A COPY OF IT!

--Patrick

I THOUGHT I had a backup. Seems I didn't.