Major Crash

[filthjack]

Please help with this huge problem !

asus p4s8x
P4 2.4
120 gb hdd master 6.4 slave
1 gig ram
etc

this was working perfectly for 1 year


The motherboard no longer instantly recognises the hard drive. It initially states that no

hard drive is installed but after going into the bios it will stall and after approximately

1 minute will then recognize it. This problem first arose whilst checking an e-mail. The PC

shut down unannounced, restarted, twice, then upon re-booting states :- Disk Boot failure,

Insert system disk then press enter. I had two hard drives and after changing them around

using the other as the master the same error occurs. I have replaced IDE cables and spoke to

Microsoft who have no idea !!
The PC has been checked by professionals who thought it was hard drive failure. As mentioned

the bios will recognize both hard drives but after about aminute or two. Why does it stall

? Icannot re-install Windows or do anything at all. Please Help.

I'm sure its not HDD problem,
Could this be a virus?

Any help greatly appreciated

Thanx




<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by filthjack on 02/15/04 04:37 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[grafixmonkey]

The bios detection stalls if the drive is failing. That's what happened to me when my drive failed, and I'm SURE it was a drive failure because I could hear the read/write heads scraping against the disk.

Someone here posted the name of a free file recovery tool not too long ago (at least I think it was free?) but if you can't wait and don't mind spending $50, you can pay $50 with credit card and download R-Studio from the company R-Labs, and be able to use it within an hour.

With that tool, if windows recognizes your hard drive, you can recover the files from it. If windows doesn't recognize it, you can try to force it to recognize it. If even that doesn't work, then R-Studio won't be able to recover anything because it doesn't know the hard drive is there.

Good luck! It looks like hard drive reliability is really through the floor nowadays. I had that first drive failure and almost lost lots of important information, and then just a week ago I had another drive failure prove to me that setting up a RAID-5 array was a good idea.