HD failure?

[djedery]

Just moved about 1000 miles. Post-move, i find my PC malfunctioning. Hard drive is not spinning up consistently (ie, turn off an on the computer three or four times, and maybe once it will). But at least, the one time it spins up, I get into Windows 98 no problem.

So, I re-orient the hard drive in the case (dell had it on its edge; i figured laying flat would be better). Sure enough, now the drive spins up every single time. But all of a sudden I can't boot into Windows. Upon power up, memory check OK, keyboard detected, mouse detected, HD detected (there is no CDrom). From there windows 98 bootup should begin. Instead, the screen goes dark immediately after HD detection. There's a blinking cursor at the top left of the screen.

This seems to be "it". I've booted up several times - always the blinking cursor.

So, anybody got a guess as to what happened?

 

[Scotty35]

The drive might not have liked being disturbed in the move, drives do not respond well to bumps etc so I would say that was the cause. When I move my system I always remove my hard drives and put them back in their shipping containers and treat them like eggs!

By turning the drive upside down, on its side may give at least some short term joy but if you can get it up again I would get all your important data off it onto another drive pronto. That drive is about to die IMO.



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[djedery]

Sounds like good advice. BTW: i got the drive to begin working consistently again (and to boot into win98). I had to use a boot disk to kick of windows setup, which then did a disk scan and corrected a few problems. From that point forward, boot up was no big deal. But to be safe I'll probably replace the HD soon anyway.

PS. Its an IBM hd - i hear they've gotten a real bad rap lately. True?