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Need help with broken HD

Last response: in Storage
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Hi, I have an old PATA HD (moms computer) that died.

Symptoms:
- Drive has been removed from old computer and put in a new working one.
- The broken drive is correctly recognized in the BIOS.
- When booting the OS on the broken drive itself, it endlessly reboots. It recognize boot loader on it but cannot proceed very far in the boot sequence.
- When booting clean Windows 7 on a working HD with broken HD attached as a secondary drive, the OS freezes after splash screen.
- Booting the good OS in safe mode, it freezes after loading "crcdisk.sys"
- I also tried to change PIO/UDMA settings with no success.

What would you try first and in what order?

Thanks..


More about : broken

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Storage Expert

Even if the drive were working 100% you probably wouldn't be able to boot it when it's been installed in a different computer, unless that computer had the same motherboard and I/O devices as the original one.

You might try downloading one of the LiveCD versions of Linux (such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.), burning it to a CD, and booting from the CD with the suspect drive attached. It may get you further than with Windows. And even if it doesn't, there's a chance you'll get a little more information as to what the problem is.

You are right about the fact that it wouldn't go far to boot the OS on broken HD.. I was only reproducing the original behavior that prompted it in the first place..

I've found "Slax" USB linux.. gonna give it a try later

If you have any important data that you want to recover from it, I would recommend using an external enclosure for that HDD. You can mount it on Linux/Ubuntu or on Windows, AFTER the OS has booted up.
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