hard disk problems

tarzan

ive a 30 gig disk with a 2 gig main partition and the rest as my second. all of a sudden the disk started having problems. now it hangs in scandisk. i get the scandisk screen, but thats where it hangs, no text to say that it is even in scandisk.
using a boot disk i can look at the c drive no problem, but when i do a dir on drive d , after listing all the names , when it should give the total number of files, directories and the toal space, it hangs instead.
i dont want to have to reformat as i have a ton of important stuff there. any suggestions ?

chernobyl

could you get your hands on norton disk doctor?

Kali

Well it obviously sounds like the boot record or main partition info for that partition is a bit ****ed..
Have you tried the usual "fdisk /mbr" approach?
Lng shot but the only one I'd go with apart from getting some old norton program for DOS.

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP

_CreeD_

Have you tried scandisk from DOS? Use the /A command and leave it going (If the damage is really bad it'll take hours).

Renton

Do you have a mate, who'd let you pop your hard drive into his PC ? If so, do it and run a Scandisk for Win9x on it. It "suprisingly" does a good job.

If you do manage to get access to your drive, May I suggest taking a backup, immediatly.

Also, Make sure the IDE cables arent loose, this is a very common symptom of that.

good luck

RentZ

WhiteWashMan

before you do that, just check your free space on your main partition. 2gig seems quiet small. wel, it does to me anyway...
but it does look like a master boot is a bit dodge

tarzan

scandisk from dos hangs, like i said
when i put it in to a diff pc as the slave drive, windows wont run either as it goes to scandisk and hangs.
thers only about 700 megs used on the main partition so its not that there isnt wnough free space.

Kegser

When Scandisk hangs you know your in trouble.

I'm a little unclear as to how you set it up in another machine as a Slave and you said Windows won't run? Do you mean you get into Windows but when you run Scandisk from Windows it hangs while trying to scan the slave?

If Scandisk isn't letting you even scan the drive in two seperate machines the Drive is quite likely fuxx0red.

At what point does Scandisk hang? Have you tried a Surface Scan?(scandisk c: /surface in DOS) Have you tried booting off a 98 boot disk and running fdisk to take a look at the partitions? Have you tried the command "fdisk /mbr" from DOS?(fdisk /mbr shouldn't affect any of the Data on your drive; it will merely wipe the Master Boot Record) Have you looked physically at the drives IDE connector and pins? Are any of the pins bent or completely broken? Is the IDE cable loose?

If nothing mentioned above is working, and you've tried the drive in two seperate systems with different sets of cables and jumper settings; then the logical conclusion is that the drive is indeed fuxx0red.

One more thing; Do you hear any strange noises from the drive itself? That can be an indication of major problems



[This message has been edited by Kegser (edited 12-05-2001).]

Balfa

It's probably not the problem, since the same thing happened in two machines, but i once had difficulties with scandisk and fdisk not liking my drive. eventually i re-auto-detected the drive in my BIOS, and it worked fine after that