Computer died how to restore?

[Dock Shunter]

Several months ago the Hard Drive failed on my 'second' computer and there were a few files that I hadn't backed up! Whilst they weren't vital they were a 'would be nice to have'.

I remembered reading somewhere that popping a defunct drive into a fridge overnight sometimes works so gave it a try and, to my surprise, managed to get it back to life for long enough to recover the files.

If anyone is going to try this make sure that the drive is sealed tightly inside a plastic bag (try to get as much air as possible out of the bag) whilst in the fridge and also watch out for condensation forming on it when you bring it out of the fridge.

This is probably a last resort but if there is no other way of recovering your data might be worth a try?

Just remember Which bag has got your hard drive in and which one has got your butties for work.....look a bit daft trying to eat your hard drive for lunch.....

Welcome to the forum Eddie.......

[Newportnobby]

Hi Eddie Welcome to the forum, and thanks for the helpful first post

[poliss]

The fridge trick only works once though, so you need to have everything ready.

[Mustermark]

I lost a hard drive a while back.  The boot sector was toast and the PC wouldn't boot up at all, and when plugged in to another PC showed nothing.  I got a guy round to see what could be done and he told me it was fried (and didn't charge for the visit).

I downloaded "getdataback for NTFS" free demo (www.runtime.org).  The whole disc was visible on the second PC and all the data was recoverable.  I then promptly bought the full version.

No idea how it works but it's bl**dy brilliant.

[grid078]

If you have another pc with a windows why not just slave the knackered one onto the operating one, in most cases you can use the fully functioning one to read the knackered one and retrieve some/all data.

[poliss]

New hard drive, new operating system. It's only taken me from midday to now, 9.30pm, to finally get on the forum. Another few days and it will be finished. 

[Chinahand]

Congratulations poliss. Good to see you up & running again.

[poliss]

My C: and D: drive is now F:? Loads of updates. Even the updates had updates which needed updating. 
I HATE puters!!

[MikeDunn]

You mean your old C: and D: is now F: ?  Or ... ?

[poliss]

The computer calls my new drive F:. Still having problems *booting the thing. Needs booting out and replacing with a new puter, but having just bought my missus a new laptop I can't afford one. :-(

*Had to press reset three times today to get it to start. 

[MikeDunn]

Your new drive is F: ?  This is the one with Windows installed to it ?  If so - something screwed up somewhere !

Did you unplug all other drives when you added this new one & installed Windows ?  As all I can think of is you didn't, hence when you installed a new copy of Windows it saw the old drive, read C: & D: there (and E: for your CD/DVD, yes ?), hence F: was allocated for the new unit ...

But - it's only a logical name.  You can remap drive letters very easily should you so wish.  But ... if my guess above is right, personally I'd bite the bullet, remove the old disk & re-install everything again from scratch ...  and only after Windows has gone in cleanly (and updated) add the old drive & let the fresh install see it.

One reason for this is you may have installed the new drive as a slave drive (assuming you're using IDE, not SATA).  If so, then the base boot info is still on the old disk.  Setting the new one to master and the old one to slave (but unplugged) and re-installing Windows (maybe you can get away with a repair install ?  Think this option is under F8 on booting) would put all the bootcode onto the new drive for certain.

Mike

PS - you said earlier that this is a second-hand drive (new to you).  Did you give it a format yourself ?  You should have had the option early in the rebuild process (about the time when you can define how large the C: and D: drives will be).  Frankly - disk drives are pretty cheap these days, I wouldn't want to use a second-hand one myself ...

[poliss]

The C: drive is now the USB card reader, D: is a DVD/CD-RW drive, E: is a DVD RAM drive, which leaves F: as the hard drive.
I bought the identical drive because I was hoping to restore everything from my external Seagate drive with it's Manager program, but they only give you instructions on how to back up, not a lot on how to restore.
I gave my 'new' second hand disk a full format. The old hard drive isn't connected. It's in a box on top of my layout. :-)

[Chinahand]

Hi poliss,

You certainly seem to be having problems.

There is a tool wthin Windows XP Control Panel that allows you to change Drive letters.

Go to Control Panel and click on 'Computer Management' then ' 'Disk Management' from the left hand side of the split screen.

If 'Computer Management' is not in your Control panel then Click on Start, then Programmes, then Administrative Tools and select Computer Management

Click on Device Manager then Disk Management.

You should now see all of your Drives with their assigned letter.

Now comes the clever bit. You cannot have 2 drives with the same letter so you must start by renaming your current 'C' Drive as 'G'. Only once this has been done can you then rename the 'F' Drive to 'C'. Once you have done that you can rename the 'G' Drive to 'F'. Carry on renaming your other drives to suit your own preferences.

Incidentally, why didn't you partition your new/2nd hand Hard Drive into 'C' & 'D' Drives ?

I agree with Mike abount 2nd hand hard drives though. They're an accident waiting to happen 

Hope you can follow this. Good luck.

[poliss]

Windows won't let me change the F: drive letter.
Why didn't I partition my new drive? Because on my old hard disk all the windows updates filled it up so much that there wasn't even room to do a defrag. I didn't want the same thing to happen with this one, nor did I want to make a partition so big that it would just be wasting hard disk space.
With the problems I had starting this morning I think the problem really lies with the motherboard.
I get a different error every day. These are just some of them.
Checksum error.
Hard disk not found.
Screen black, nothing happening.
Hangs on the windows starting page. (The activity bar under Windows stops moving.)
Windows loads, but system hangs as it gets to the desktop.
A couple of reboots gets the system going properly and there are no problems with a restart.

I have a spare motherboard, but I really, really, really don't want to mess around taking everything out and putting the new one in. 

[Chinahand]

Did you change the 'C' Drive to 'G' first ?

It sounds to me as though the whole thing is on its last legs.