bobbert Posted August 2, 2005 Share Posted August 2, 2005 Recently I took my dump drive to a friend's place to copy some apps. Once all was set, he switched on his PC and got some message saying "non-system disk...", the message you get if you have no OS installed and what have you. so we fiddled with it a bit and still nothing. So we put both drives in his brother's PC to see if we couldnt do something there. Put em in and once in windows we had a look... despite both drives being partitioned nothing was picked up and XP asked us if we wanted to format. We cancelled. We did nothing to the drives afterwards. I went home and put my drive in with another working drive to see if i couldnt detect anythinig... but nothing. same problem. I took the stuffed drive out and did nothing with it for the weekend. I used my working drive for the whole weekend and all was cool. yesterday i got home and disconnected my good drive and put in the bad one with and XP S2 cd to try an see if i couldnt get it working. DISKPART couldnt see any partitions but could see 2GB of unallocated space I'd never used. which is odd since its 120GB. also in BIOS it was detected as a 2056MB drive. ive seen plenty of issues like this so i ran fixmbr to see if the mbr was stuffed... said the mbr found was non-standard or corrupted or some such, do i want to replace/repair it. yes. restarted and went back. still see no partitions or space cept the 2GB. ran fixmbr again and it said mbr non-standard or corrupted so used it again for luck... and nothing... still messed. so took out drive and reconnected good one so i could do some work...but now got "non-system disk" error like with my firends drive! when I'd used it perfectly fine about two hours beforehand. i was really not in a good mood. the drive was cable-select so moved it from primary master ide to secondary master... restart. runs and starts loading into windows but gets blue screen error and PC restarts. what the hell? swopped it bakc to primary master... now get "verifying DMI pool data" for like an hour so swopped it again and it started booting but then restarted. same with my friends drive - "verifying dmi pool data".... so of course now im really not happy! especially since i have a project due next week and i have no pc to work off! only good thin is with 'good' drive i can still detect the full 120 GB in bios.so i took em both to a friend and we ran norton on the 'bad' drive. It found 3 MBR's and 4 boot records but still only 2GB. dodgy. we took it to another friend who's also a techie and he put it in and fiddled for about 2 hours with it. he wiped 2 mbr's with MBRTool and with win 98se boot cd he ran fdisk. found the missing partition which is great! deleted all partitions and created new one... go into XP and couldnt detect the partition, not in comp management or with partition magic or anything... dodgy. so today he's gonna low-level format the bastard and see if that doesn help.next we put in the 'good' drive. detects the full partition but no way of recovering data so we deleted the partition and created a new and i went home to install XP. get home and start the process... all going good, chose partition, formatted partition, copied XP install files to partition and it restarted... going and then on attempting to boot from the drive... 'error loading operating system' *falls over*. tried new partitions, tried different XP setup cd as well but it gives the same problem.... ran fixmbr and it found "non-standard/corrupt" mbr... but i left it at that...can anyone help me with this? it is incredibly inconveniencing! i've basically lost 240GB of data (drives where both full) and now i cant even use them when i really REALLY need to! are there any viruses out at the moment that could have caused this! ive come across a few forums where to get XP to install i change the drive from auto to LBA or Large in BIOS to overcome "error loading OS" so im gonna try that when i get home but i dont see why that would make a difference when it was fine previously. so if someone could PLEASE help id really appreciate it! ive already lost all my data so ill try anything! thanks for taking the time to read this far Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atomizer Posted August 2, 2005 Share Posted August 2, 2005 hopefully someone here will know more than i, and i know you said you ran an AV scan on it, but i'm thinking a virus anyway. if you can't get help here and your data is that important, you may want to look in to some data revovery stuff, or even send it out to have it recovered. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tester_pedro Posted August 2, 2005 Share Posted August 2, 2005 (edited) electrostatic issue? sounds like this for me, so there is no way to recover it... maybe a specialized company would do. maybe the drives electronics was "killed".or changing temperature by transporting... did you waited about 1-2 hours before connecting the drives? so thermal shock, electronics "killed"there is more but everything is the same as I mentioned above.EDIT:and the pins on the data connector, are they not "crooked " (hope it is good translated)? Edited August 2, 2005 by tester_pedro Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobbert Posted August 3, 2005 Author Share Posted August 3, 2005 might be electric shock but hope it isnt... and the pins are perfect, no problems there... electric shock aside am gonna do some mucking about on the 'good' drive. could the electric shock business have the side effect of the monitor getting a zap? because once or twice ive noticed that my monitor has a very quick 'power failure' type thing and flickers once....since the one drive is a seagate, have downloaded all the utils they have available and am gonna do a Zero Fill (as they call it) on the drive. if it was a virus then hopefully it should solve the problem, since if it was the mbr or whatever that got messed up, then all will be good after the drive's been reset... are the any worthwhile utils for Hitachi drives? i went to the main site and got some utils but was hoping there would be something else? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atomizer Posted August 3, 2005 Share Posted August 3, 2005 search for "data recovery freeware" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tester_pedro Posted August 3, 2005 Share Posted August 3, 2005 might be electric shock but hope it isnt... and the pins are perfect, no problems there... electric shock aside am gonna do some mucking about on the 'good' drive. could the electric shock business have the side effect of the monitor getting a zap? because once or twice ive noticed that my monitor has a very quick 'power failure' type thing and flickers once....since the one drive is a seagate, have downloaded all the utils they have available and am gonna do a Zero Fill (as they call it) on the drive. if it was a virus then hopefully it should solve the problem, since if it was the mbr or whatever that got messed up, then all will be good after the drive's been reset... are the any worthwhile utils for Hitachi drives? i went to the main site and got some utils but was hoping there would be something else?<{POST_SNAPBACK}>zero fill is a good try... rescued once my seagate HDD in desktop from bad sectors.i've hitachi drive in my notebook but there are not much progies like zero fill... wait, will do a search... here it comes:http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2828.html and then try to look here: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htmhope you get drives back, the data are gone forever I suppose wish one well (I know very good what data lost is - once I've badly maked a disk operation - cloning drive - and lost some assembler programming and personal data)PS: one tip.in bios try to let everything on auto. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobbert Posted August 4, 2005 Author Share Posted August 4, 2005 okay.... update time. tried saving the seagete's stuff but everytime i tried an xp installation would get an error, so Zero Fill it was. took about 10 hours (omg!) but at 2am this morning managed to successfully install xp! oh, it was a full Zero Fill, the quick Zero Fill did absolutely stuff all. so the drive is puttering along happily now and no issues... except when i ran SeaTools after installing XP, it said there were errors with the FAT on both the drive's partitions, lovely. XP however reports no problems (no surprise there) could there still be something amiss?oh yeah, after the quick zero fill, i tried the xp installation and all partitions were done and formatted, xp install files copied to drive and then restarted... when i tried booting off the drive it said ntdlr was missing and there were about five or six oddly coloured characters spaced randomly on the screen. n yesterday i read about a virus that caused that so ja. seems twas a virus after allgonna try and get the hitachi up asap, hopefully by next week.shot for the help Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tester_pedro Posted August 4, 2005 Share Posted August 4, 2005 okay.... update time. tried saving the seagete's stuff but everytime i tried an xp installation would get an error, so Zero Fill it was. took about 10 hours (omg!) but at 2am this morning managed to successfully install xp! oh, it was a full Zero Fill, the quick Zero Fill did absolutely stuff all. so the drive is puttering along happily now and no issues... except when i ran SeaTools after installing XP, it said there were errors with the FAT on both the drive's partitions, lovely. XP however reports no problems (no surprise there) could there still be something amiss?oh yeah, after the quick zero fill, i tried the xp installation and all partitions were done and formatted, xp install files copied to drive and then restarted... when i tried booting off the drive it said ntdlr was missing and there were about five or six oddly coloured characters spaced randomly on the screen. n yesterday i read about a virus that caused that so ja. seems twas a virus after allgonna try and get the hitachi up asap, hopefully by next week.shot for the help<{POST_SNAPBACK}>zero fill took about 10 hours?... thats a bit strange but it can be.. maybe there are some bad sectors that were tried to write by the disk electronicsthe xp install CD is not infected? - only a tip... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobbert Posted August 8, 2005 Author Share Posted August 8, 2005 xp cd is fine, and all is running perfectly... replaced the power supply and pc is performing alot better than before.... havent had any problems since.... thank god for Zero Fill.... it was about 10% finished per hour at a constant rate so i doubt it was bad sectors that made it take so long Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tester_pedro Posted August 8, 2005 Share Posted August 8, 2005 good to read good news.best wishes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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