AAACk! My Computer no longer boots - part 2

[Mark Lamutt]

Sigh...

After disabling mup.sys in the recovery console and booting up the computer, all seemed well...

I then shut down, reconnected my 250GB drive, and tried to boot. Hang...

Rebooted into safe mode, now it's hanging on ndis.sys. Although, obviously that's not the problem.

Yesterday, XP was reading this drive just fine. I recorded to it just fine. I shut down normally. Now, with this drive connected, XP hangs on boot.

What's my next step? There's nothing really on the drive that I care a whole lot about, so I'm not worried about losing the HD recordings that I had on there. But, there were no signs that this drive was going to crash. No grinding, no clicking, no noise of any kind. There's no way the computer could have been jarred or bumped or anything like that (it's on the middle shelf in my stereo equipment rack).

Other than pulling the drive out of the case and connecting it to another computer to see if I can get at it (which I can do, but it's difficult in my desktop case - either front facia has to come off to get the drive out the front, or I have to remove the motherboard to get the drive out the back), what should my next step be?

I'm going to make a boot disk from this computer and try to run a checkdisk on it. Anyone know if there's a "dos" version of norton disk doctor that comes with Norton 2003 that I can use on it?

[Mark Lamutt]

No go on the chkdsk - can only be run in windows mode...and of course the boot disk created is a dos boot disk...

[Mike123abc]

I still reccomend using the Windows XP bood CD to repair the windows installation. It is fast and easy and I have not yet had it lose any files.

Well after writing the above I see that you tried this already in the other thread (part 1)... Oh well...

[Mark Lamutt]

I ended up pulling the drive out of my HTPC and connected it up to another computer running XP that I have here. Turned it on, and the boot process appeared to hang on my 2nd XP box as well. So, I decided to just let it sit there to see what happened. 2 hours later, I noticed on screen what appeared to be a check disk output listing a whole lot of unreadable sectors on the disk. And then it finished, and the computer booted up. So, I'm currently copying off the recordings to my 3rd computer here. After that finishes overnight, I'll assess how bad off the drive is. The recordings took about 130GB of the space, so maybe the bad sectors are in other areas of the drive.

The drive is still under warrenty with Maxtor - I checked that online. So, I'll probably persue a warrenty replacement at this point depending on how much of the drive is gone.

And, I'd also say that based on this, my XP install on my HTPC is probably fine, as it was the drive that was causing the hang on boot. More in my continuing saga as it develops... :)

[CoriBright]

If you the replacement from Maxtor route, you can give them your cc # and they will ship a new drive to you asap via UPS. You then have 30 days to get the old one to them, or your cc will be debited. Or you can keep the cc secret, send them the old drive and they'll send the new one when they receive the old one. I've always taken the first option (three times now) but I'm an ALL Maxtor network. Currently seven hard drives from them. (Can't remember what's in the notebook and the tablet!)

[Bogy]

3 times you have had a Maxtor fail under warranty? And you are still using them? Thanks for the advice, I won't start using them.

[CoriBright]

Out of about 20 or so hard drives over 10 years! Percentage wise and with their amount of use (regularly have files 60+gb in size) it's average.

If you don't like Maxtors, just avoid the DeathStar (IBM/Hitachi). I have never known one live more than 18 months. Friend of mine in Canada went through 17 in 24 months. Now that's something I'd avoid. (thankfully he is a regular backer-upper!)

[Bogy]

Faithful WD user, for about 12 years now. I've still got my second around here somewhere, a whopping 340 meg that works if you can still find something small enough to fit on it. :D My first hd ever, a 30 meg got trashed with my first computer when we moved 3 years ago. At least 9 years old at the time, although it only got used when my son wanted to play some really old games the last few years.

[cdru]

I'm a semi faithful WD user as well. My current main system has 3 WD drives in it now and have had 0 problems with it. I recently found a few decent deals on 200GB Seagates so I decided to try them out. Now that storage sizes have gotten big enough that they are not easily (or cheaply) backed up frequently, I'm going more with reliability and warranty then price. I much rather pay $100 for a 200GB drive with a 5 year warranty then a $60 drive after $100 in rebates with a 1 or 3 year warranty. Of course that could just be Seagate's marketing plan and they are no more reliable then the 1 or 3 year warranty...who knows. I've used them in the past with no problems.

All the hard drive manufacturers have drive diagnostic utilities. These utilities will scan the drives looking for and possibly repairing problems. They will also tell you the general health of the drives. All drives over their lifetime will get both hard and soft errors. Enabling the SMART feature in your bios for the drives may give you an advanced warning of an impending problem so that correction can be taken.

Mark, you said that you know the drive wasn't bumped. Have you thought about heat issues? Some drives have a build in temperature that you can access using a program like SpeedFan. You might see what the temperature is like. Heat can kill a hard drive.

[Mark Lamutt]

It could be a heat issue. I've got about an inch around the drive on all sides in my desktop case, and the case is reasonably well ventilated with a front case fan, rear case fan, and dual fans on the power supply, but it could be heat.

I currently am running with 11 hard drives in my 3 computer networked recording environment, from 80GB to 250GB. 4 of them are Maxtors and 7 are Western Digitals. This one was the most recent one that I bought 8 months ago. And, it's the first hard drive that I've ever had a problem with. I'm looking forward to reading the chkdsk report tonight to see how much of the drive that I lost. I was able to copy off just about all of the HD recordings intact last night - only lost 1 out of 8 of them, which I thought was pretty good.

[cdru]

It could be a heat issue. I've got about an inch around the drive on all sides in my desktop case, and the case is reasonably well ventilated with a front case fan, rear case fan, and dual fans on the power supply, but it could be heat.The traditional model for air flow in an ATX case is in throught the lower front of the case (in a tower configuration), up over the memory and across the cpu, then either out throught the power supply or out the rear fan. Note that little air gets up and around the hard drives. The ambient air temperature quickly rises as their just isn't any airflow. You can buy hard drive coolers which basically suck in cold air from in front of the case and blow over the drives.

There are a variery of programs out their that will read the hard drive temperature while the drives are running.

[invaliduser88]

Have you/can you try to pull some of your memory out. I had a server in Dubai that the locals couldn't figure out what the issues were. After the 13 hour flight over, I pulled half the memory out and then the machine was stable as a rock. Granted, a slow as molasis rock, but dropping some new memory in to replace the sims I pulled took care of that.

[Mark Lamutt]

Thanks guys. In this case, my drive was the culprit, and I've already RMA'd it to Maxtor. Their test software took about 2 seconds to run and report back that the drive was dead.

[Redster]

Well, that sucks,, you did mention that you got most of the stuff off, which makes it not too bad. It could have been worse.

[firephoto]

I used to use WD drives all the time but I finally got tired of their loudness in the noise dept. I've had a couple of 80g "deathstars" running 24/7 since 2001 and no problems except the annoying (and noisy) internal test it does from time to time. The failed ones had a bad logic board I believe. They were 40-60g drives and lower I think. A lot of dells had them at one point. I don't know if I've every had a Maxtor, but I've heard of plent of them failing. I currently have a 120g Seagate, the 80g IBM, and a 20g Quantum Fireball for a system backup drive. The seagate is really quiet, the IBM will be near silent now with the new atomic filesystem I'm testing on it (reiser4). I'm actually not sure what my Dell Optiplex Gxa (router box) has for a drive but it's 6gb and it is really noisy on the new wood shelf I built for it. Some padded feet are waiting to be installed. ;)

Mark, I'm not sure what you're running for your HTPC but it sounds like a windows box. Have you considered MythTV? I haven't ran it but I've read comments that it it really good. It runs on a linux distro. http://www.mythtv.org/ I also saw a slashdot article about it today. http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/04/09/04/1838240.shtml?tid=129&tid=137&tid=106
It's a pretty big project with active development.

[Mark Lamutt]

Redster - yup...got most of the recordings off before the drive completely went, but it wouldn't have bothered me a whole lot if I hadn't. Just about all of my drives are used to record HD from OTA.

Firephoto - I'm running XP Pro. I use my HTPC(s) for 2 things only - to record HD with my hipix cards and to watch DVDs with Theatertek. Nothing else is done on them, so I'm pretty happy with my setup. Because of that, I've never really looked very deeply into MythTV. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

[jerry downing]

I have seen computers that have had "Drive Problems" where the drive was not recognized or would not spin up. This has been caused by having too much hardware and not enough power supply. Those puny supplies that come with most computer cases just don't cut it.

[Bogy]

Got home last night and found my son on my computer. His had "crashed". The screen said no bootable disk was found. I yanked off the cover, flipped up the drive bay, pushed on the cable connectors until I found one that wasn't seated properly, restarted the box, and guess what, it booted. My wife thanked me but my son was too embarrassed to say anything. I love simple solutions. :lol: