Hard Drive Crash while running windows 2000

[HF_JBB]

Hello everybody. Hopefully someone can help my friend’s problem or isolate the problem. This is what happened.

We go to a multimedia school (but there’s no more technicians at our school for the moment…) and we have portable IDE Hard Drives (20 gigs, Western Digital), which we can put into our work, stations at school or at home. (Here’s a picture of a portable HD http://pages.infinit.net/jbb/portableHD.jpg)

While coming back from our break, my friend when back to her station, moved the mouse, and then the PC rebooted… The screensaver wasn’t active; the pc was not used for about 10-15 mins…. Anyway, when it got to the boot screen, it froze there with no ERROR message. We checked carefully and we noticed the pc didn’t detect the Hard Drive anymore on the primary slave. The hard drive has crashed and we can’t access it anymore. But the good thing is, my friend already made some backups. So it doesn’t matter if we have to erase everything on the drive to make it work again.

My other friend tried the HD at home, and wasn’t able to access it or detect it as well. I just got the HD today and tried it here. And I can sort of access it. However this is what’s happening.

When I insert the HD, The primary master (c:) and slave (d:) have all sorts of STRANGE ASCII Symbols and Characters during the boot process. What would this mean??? It does the same thing in the BIOS. But it knows it has 20 Gigs though during the boot, but it hangs afterwards on a black screen.

When I take out the HD…everything is back to normal…my primary master is detected as a Quantum HD…boots to window…

I found a couple of dos utilities on the net.

So I booted the pc with the crashed hard drive, with a boot disk. However I noticed I couldn’t access my main drive (c:). It doesn’t recognize the partition. Probably because of the strange ASCII characters it got during the boot.

In the prompt, when I try to access the crashed drive, this is the error I get.

Invalid media type reading drive d:

And when I used a dos utility program, this is the errors I got while trying to read the crashed drive.

Boot Sector Unknown
Error reading sector #0 or Boot sector is invalid.

With the same program, I was able to search and access some files and save them to the floppy disk.

I tried fixing the partition with fdisk, or make a new one and then format it. But I wasn’t able to. It wrote me “format complete. Unable to write boot. Format terminated”

I don’t know where to go from here besides bringing the disk to a computer shop…

Any help would be greatly appreciated and thank you for taking the time to read this.

[sage45]

One thing with Win2K that I have ran into... Nothing of this nature actually sounds like an internal issue with the drive itself, the controller failed or something...

But, when using a drive with Win2K that has an existing Primary HD and adding a new slave or second hard drive to the system that has an Active Primary partion on it, Win2K will create the page file on the second hard drive... Once you remove the second hard drive you render both the primary and the secondary useless untill a reimage/reformat of the drives... Just a little bit of knowledge but as I said this actually sounds like an internal controller failure on either the drive or the external bay... Try swapping this hard drive with another hard drive (remove it from it's encased external bay and install it either as a slave drive or install it into a know good working bay, if the problem follows the drive then it is most likely an onboard controller issue with the drive... To test this you can take two drives (must be same make and model) and swap the controllers (usually means removing 5-6 small screws and swapping the controllers, which can be done without voiding the warrenty on the device since you are not opening the drive itself)... So to recap here are the steps:

1. Take the bad external drive and remove the hard drive from the external bay and swap it with or place it natively into a system.
2. Boot the system with the drive installed or in the new external bay.
3. If the system boots, then the problem lies within the old external drive bay, either a bad controller or cable).
4. Either way, with the old controller install the drive you removed from the test external drive bay and test this drives ability to boot (gotta make sure that it is the controller and maybe not the combination of the two)...
5. By this time you should be able to tell if the drive bay is bad or not... If you feel it is still the drive or the drive failed to boot properly try swapping the controllers with the good drive and the bad drive (located on the bottom of the drive and secured by 5-6 small screws, usually hex T-8 or T-6) Be carful when removing the controllers as you can bend the pins, if any, that are holding the controller onto the drive...

All in all it's pretty simple...

Best of luck,

-sage-

[HF_JBB]

the first thing i did before posting this, was placing the bad hard drive natively into my system. I get the same result when i put in the bay. I can't boot because the external drive and my local drive gets Strange ASCII characters from the auto detection.

Some people suggested me to do a "low level format" on the external drive.

[sage45]

Yeah, I'd go ahead and attempt a low level format... Sounds about like that's the only other alternative left to you at this time... However, you might also try a bios update on your system...

-sage-

[HF_JBB]

i dont know how to do a low level format...not sure what it is exactly.

also, some person suggested using a software called ZAP

"Zap is a DOS software utility that writes zeroes to the first 128 sectors on a hard disk drive, including the Master Boot Record and the first Partition Boot Record. It can be used with both SCSI and IDE drives"

[HF_JBB]

i just tried the zapping, it was able to do the operation...but it didn't fix the problem.

[sage45]

Have you tried that BIOS upgrade???

-sage-

[HF_JBB]

i updated my bios, still have the same problem.

im out of ideas..

[sage45]

Hmmm... I am too... Does it just happen with this one unit???

-sage-