hard drive failure?

[eirias]

I think my hard drive died this weekend. Win2K computer, going on 4 years old, just did a clean reinstall in late June. This evening, got an error message:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.

\system32\ntoskrnl.exe"

Unfortunately, my system repair and Win2K disks are at school, so I stuck in a WinXP CD and poked around in the Recovery Console. It gave me a c:\ prompt and I tried to look in different directories - access denied for all directories tried (including winnt, dell, documents & settings...). Config.SYS and IO.SYS and other files seem to have a size of 0 bytes. I ran a chkdsk and it kept starting over and then told me there were one or more unrecoverable problems.

If any of you know Windows - does this sound like a hard disk failure? How does one investigate such a thing? What would I need to know in order to hook my hard drive up to another computer without frying them both? I do have an adapter (though it's at the office at the moment).

People who respond with a suggestion like, "Switch to [fill in non-Windows OS here]," are missing the point and will be summarily kicked in the nuts, and you won't get to look all clever and snide, either, because I'm screening comments.

As it happens, I backed up all of my documents about a week ago; but unfortunately this doesn't include things like the exam I was working on on Friday night (1.5/10 questions answered) or the ten-minute presentation I wanted to give on auditory illusions tomorrow, which may have to be skipped now unless I can get access to my prof's laptop. I think/hope/pray those are the only recent successes I've lost. No - damnit, I just realized, tomorrow's 8:30 AM six-minute presentation is gone too. Hopefully I can wing it.

Comments

[eldan.livejournal.com]

It looks like hard drive failure to me, but I don't know anywhere near enough about hardware to rule out other possible causes.

If you have the right kind of adapter, then you'll get one of two scenarios: either you can just plug the hard drive into another machine, and the machine will see it as a secondary drive, or they may be some switches on either hard drive (the sick one and/or the boot drive of the co-operative computer) that need to be set. If you do need to set anything, the hard drive manufacturers' websites should have the information you need, and the key is to make sure the healthy boot drive is the "primary master", and the sick drive is "secondary" and/or "slave".

On Apple laptops there is a way to get the machine to act as an external hard drive for another computer, which might at least allow you to back up data--the chances are it's a localised hard drive problem which happens to have hit the boot sector, rather than something that has made the disk entirely unuseable. There may be something similar on your computer, and it may be a vendor-specific thing, especially if it is a laptop.

I had a similar problem at the start of the year, and I managed to use a Windows CD-ROM to repair the installation. The affected computer has worked fine since, though each time I run scandisk a few more clusters on the hard drive get marked as "bad". I guess it's a matter of time till something else important goes bad, but at least I have a useable computer till then and I know not to let my anything important on that machine not be backed up.

If you can in any way access the data to back it up before trying to repair windows, I'd recommend it. It is usually possible to do the repair without losing data, but it's not guaranteed, and if you just pick the wrong option in a lapse of concentration you can end up reformatting....

And finally, if you manage to repair windows, it will tell you during the install process if it finds damaged regions on the hard drive.

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

Well, you _do_ have tonight to put together some notes for next morning, and to rehearse whether you're at 6 minutes(or at least 5.5) a couple times.

Besides, you're capable enough to wing it.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the materials for the presentation are at school, as I figured, "Hey, I got this done way early, I can leave the article here." I'll probably just go in half an hour early to practice. But thanks. ;)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your suggestions! Yes, figuring out which is master and which is slave is what scares me, because that can royally screw things up if you do it wrong, right?

The thing that makes me worry that this is nonrecoverable is that the HD had been making ugly ugly noises for a week or two at least... and it's not a spring chicken sorta machine. But we'll see.

[eldan.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, the only damage that you can do by misconfiguring the master vs slave is temporary - while the wrong one is set as "master" the machine won't boot. I'm 99% sure that once you switch that back to the right way (or just remove the sickly drive) the computer you were using to test it with will be back to normal.

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

i wouldn't give up on the drive just yet
tod and i have had some pretty screwed up but functional hard drives (like one that required being hit against something hard in order to work whenever it was shut down)

tod says it sounds like it's more likely to be hardware problems (i.e. hard drive failing) than software problems
and suggests if you want to try to get the data off of it, you might try using knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net/) which is a linux OS on a cd that you could throw in and see if you can access any of what's on the hard drive
of course, that's assuming you have a cd burner available and want to muck about in linux trying to find your way

as for screwing up slave/master stuff, he says it shouldn't really destroy any data, so that's probably worth tinkering with

[darlox.livejournal.com]

If you want to try a quick-fix -- even if your drive is failing, you might be able to make it bootable long enough to get to your files and run a scandisk. It's possible that your drive is fine and you caught a virus that corrupts your boot configuration. Either way, if you get the system up and running, DO NOT shut it down again until you've determined the source of the problem.

Try this first:

* Boot into the Recovery Console and type (assuming your CDROM is drive D, and your hard drive is drive C:

expand d:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ c:\windows\system32

then...
bootcfg /rebuild
Reply Yes
For the name, enter Recovered Windows XP
Leave OS Options blank

Reboot and see if it comes up.

If the above fails, inside the recovery console run:
chkdsk /r

This will take awhile... if there's recoverable information, that will recover it.

If your drive has in fact failed (chkdsk returns gobs of errors), shut down and get a replacement. You will most likely be able to salvage most of your information, but if it's a head-crash, you're toast. Is the drive making clicky-bouncy noises?

If yes, screw the above -- if it's going "click! bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce..." then that means that the read head is actually scratching across the platters. The only way to recover that data will be to send it out to have the platters extracted. If you try to copy the data yourself, you will most likely do little else besides nuke your data beyond any recovery.

Anyhow, hope that helps. Let me know if there's anything else you need.

[darlox.livejournal.com]

ACK!!! WAIT WAIT WAIT!!!!

I missed a VITAL point above!! If you have a W2K computer and you're using a WinXP CD, DO NOT EXTRACT NTOSKRNL.EX_!!! This will utterly bugger you.

You can still try the bootcfg /rebuild, and the chkdsk. If you find a W2K CD from someone near you, then try the extract and that will most likely fix it -- at least for the short term.

Sorry -- I hope you caught this comment in time.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your solicitude :). I'm not acting on any of this helpful advice at present, so no worries - a take-home exam due Friday is more urgent ATM. Tomorrow I'll have a Win2K CD, a HD adapter, a non-borked computer, and some helpful tech support people at my disposal, so I will be better equipped to actually do something with everyone's suggestions. Thanks again for your ideas!

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Ditto on what the thekat03 said about knoppix (http://www.knoppix.net/). It is the greatest invention since sliced bread for fixing computers. Although, that assumes that you have CD-ROM drive which you can boot from.
I'd also endorse what darlox said about the noises. If your drive is making really funny noises then a better use of your time is to just grieve the loss and move on.

[madmanatw.livejournal.com]

I agree with a bunch of the above. Frequently when a drive is too dead to boot off of you can still recover some stuff from it. Knoppix is one good way to do so, but putting the drive in another computer should work too and, depending on your setups, might be easier. You can't permanently hurt anything by trying to boot with two masters or anything like that- at worst you'll confuse it. (In an ideal world, anyway. I have suspicions that trying to put a dead laptop hard drive in my desktop with an adaptor to let it plug into the IDE cable killed the desktop, but I can't prove it. And that desktop was already not being used because it was half dead anyway.)

In dire emergencies there are hellishly expensive services that can go in and recover data, but it sounds like nothing that might only be recoverable that way would still be important to recover by the time that would work out. If that makes sense.

I know several people who carry Knoppix mini-CDs in their wallets. It's just that useful.