- May 1, 2013
- 3
- 0
- 10,510
So, I encountered this little problem soon after figuring out that 2 out of my 3 hard drives are basically filled with bad sectors. I knew about one of them, but the other was working flawlessly up to that point, where now half of it is magically broken. I tried upping an XP Pro SP3 installation on the remaining one hard drive, which is an old Maxtor IDE one, sporting about 42 GBs of space. Then this message appeared out of nowhere after the first reboot, and after I tried everything, it still does the same. To make this more comprehensive, I will list what I tried so far:
-Setting the access mode to Large
-Setting the access mode to LBS
-Flashing the BIOS, which was unnecessary to begin with because I had the latest version already [ABIT NF8, version 1.9, correct me if I am wrong about this. Yeah, old PC is old]
-Zero filling the hard drive from an Ubuntu Live CD [pretty much the only thing working on this PC] - not a thing changed afterwards
-Changing the jumpers around
-disconnecting and re-adding all the other hard drives, every combination
-messing around with options in BIOS, I can't even remember what, but none of them even produced different error messages.
-Installing Ubuntu on it. That time it gave me a simple "Read Error" line and then left it at that.
-Installing Ubuntu on one of the other faulty drives, trying to start this one up from the boot menu [sorry, I'm new to linux, I'm talking about the screen where you can choose recovery mode and memtest], which threw me into a black screen with a command line and nothing else.
-Trying Seatools for DOS to zero fill it - now this was funny. This piece of misery won't let me do any kind of erase on either this, or another Maxtor drive, the options are simply not there. I've read about this on the Seagate forums, and seen like a dozen people having this problem, and noone cared to answer them. I ran all kinds of tests on it though, and it says the driver is all fine and dandy
-Setting the capacity to 32 GBs from Seatools DOS, since it was the only option available under the "advanced" tab. This caused the BIOS to not even try to boot up from the drive, asking me to insert a boot disk.
-Trying Seatools from Ubuntu... oh wait, I can't since it's not supported.
-Trying to install Win XP on the faulty drives to have it there as a temporary solution, or to use Seatools from there, but the installer flat out refuses to start an installation on any of those drives.
-Offering sacrifices to the all the evil gods that might help me... you get the idea.
So basically, the most I can do on this machine right now is run Ubuntu Live from a DVD I burned some years ago, and install it on a faulty drive where it will last for a good 1-2 days before going HURR and eventually reaching a stage where you can't even boot it. I just got a job, and I won't have the funds to buy a new hard drive, let alone another PC until mid-June, so it would be nice to have at least something for that one and a half month to watch movies/play games on, etc after I come home from work.
Anyone has any other ideas to try? I'll be off trying to install XP on an 8 GB USB stick, but in the meantime, any kind of help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
-Setting the access mode to Large
-Setting the access mode to LBS
-Flashing the BIOS, which was unnecessary to begin with because I had the latest version already [ABIT NF8, version 1.9, correct me if I am wrong about this. Yeah, old PC is old]
-Zero filling the hard drive from an Ubuntu Live CD [pretty much the only thing working on this PC] - not a thing changed afterwards
-Changing the jumpers around
-disconnecting and re-adding all the other hard drives, every combination
-messing around with options in BIOS, I can't even remember what, but none of them even produced different error messages.
-Installing Ubuntu on it. That time it gave me a simple "Read Error" line and then left it at that.
-Installing Ubuntu on one of the other faulty drives, trying to start this one up from the boot menu [sorry, I'm new to linux, I'm talking about the screen where you can choose recovery mode and memtest], which threw me into a black screen with a command line and nothing else.
-Trying Seatools for DOS to zero fill it - now this was funny. This piece of misery won't let me do any kind of erase on either this, or another Maxtor drive, the options are simply not there. I've read about this on the Seagate forums, and seen like a dozen people having this problem, and noone cared to answer them. I ran all kinds of tests on it though, and it says the driver is all fine and dandy
-Setting the capacity to 32 GBs from Seatools DOS, since it was the only option available under the "advanced" tab. This caused the BIOS to not even try to boot up from the drive, asking me to insert a boot disk.
-Trying Seatools from Ubuntu... oh wait, I can't since it's not supported.
-Trying to install Win XP on the faulty drives to have it there as a temporary solution, or to use Seatools from there, but the installer flat out refuses to start an installation on any of those drives.
-Offering sacrifices to the all the evil gods that might help me... you get the idea.
So basically, the most I can do on this machine right now is run Ubuntu Live from a DVD I burned some years ago, and install it on a faulty drive where it will last for a good 1-2 days before going HURR and eventually reaching a stage where you can't even boot it. I just got a job, and I won't have the funds to buy a new hard drive, let alone another PC until mid-June, so it would be nice to have at least something for that one and a half month to watch movies/play games on, etc after I come home from work.
Anyone has any other ideas to try? I'll be off trying to install XP on an 8 GB USB stick, but in the meantime, any kind of help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram