- Jan 13, 2014
- 17
- 0
- 10,510
I booted up my home computer yesterday to quite a sight: a black screen with a blinking cursor. More terrifying than the BSOD. Horribly timed too, because I had just recently used my usual backup drive at work and had not yet brought it back home to resume backup. I had formatted it first, so there is no backup data on it.
The computer is a gateway desktop, purchased about 5 years ago. I've upgraded the PSU and video card, and added a Blu-Ray drive, but the motherboard, processor, HDD, and anything else is still original. There have not been any new hardware additions lately, no dual boot OS installed, and not really any new software except virtualbox running a debian guest.
In my search for a solution, I tried booting from the Windows 7 installation disk to attempt some repairs. My attempts were unsuccessful.
I tried using bootrec.exe from the command line to see what I could do. The drive (a 1TB HDD) is shown in BIOS and shown in the CL when I send the "list disk" command, but it is showing 930-something GB of unallocated space in one partition, 250-some MB of unallocated space in another, and two other blank 0 byte partitions. The disk was originally partitioned in two sections: a 700 GB partition, and another with the rest of the available space.
With the bootrec utility i tried running /FixMbr - which said it was succesful, but made no difference. I also ran /FixBoot, /ScanOs, and /RebuildBcd, and none of them had any effect. /ScanOs was not able to find any windows installation on the disk.
The windows installer on the disk also would not let me format, partition, or install on the disk.
So is the HDD just trashed? Failure of physical parts maybe, which is why it still appears in BIOS and system repair? I can deal with the lost data (although it sucks) but is there any chance I could install a new drive, install windows to it, and recover some of the data from the drive?
The computer is a gateway desktop, purchased about 5 years ago. I've upgraded the PSU and video card, and added a Blu-Ray drive, but the motherboard, processor, HDD, and anything else is still original. There have not been any new hardware additions lately, no dual boot OS installed, and not really any new software except virtualbox running a debian guest.
In my search for a solution, I tried booting from the Windows 7 installation disk to attempt some repairs. My attempts were unsuccessful.
I tried using bootrec.exe from the command line to see what I could do. The drive (a 1TB HDD) is shown in BIOS and shown in the CL when I send the "list disk" command, but it is showing 930-something GB of unallocated space in one partition, 250-some MB of unallocated space in another, and two other blank 0 byte partitions. The disk was originally partitioned in two sections: a 700 GB partition, and another with the rest of the available space.
With the bootrec utility i tried running /FixMbr - which said it was succesful, but made no difference. I also ran /FixBoot, /ScanOs, and /RebuildBcd, and none of them had any effect. /ScanOs was not able to find any windows installation on the disk.
The windows installer on the disk also would not let me format, partition, or install on the disk.
So is the HDD just trashed? Failure of physical parts maybe, which is why it still appears in BIOS and system repair? I can deal with the lost data (although it sucks) but is there any chance I could install a new drive, install windows to it, and recover some of the data from the drive?
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