Well, not really, but it's a royal pain. I'm posting this from my laptop. The drive on which my main Winbloze installation lives (lived?) seems to have died in its sleep last night.

Chkdsk says multiple unrecoverable errors are found on it.

Fortunately, I didn't have much data on it, but at a minimum I'll probably have to repartition and format, and I may have to replace the drive. Either way, I guess I've lost all of my software installation on that drive.

Unless someone else has a suggestion before I do the deed...

Your HDD hardware's probably dead. Not the platters, but logic ( 0.1% chance, could be faulty or loose IDE cable ). So reformat prolly wont help, or will for very short time.
If you need the data, there are companies that recover it from platters for a hefty amount of $$$. If you dont, get a new HDD.

If its just the logic, If you can find an exact match for your hard drive, you can swap the little board on the drive. Thats what the recovery services try first.

My advice it to replace it and keep it as is. Post the model number on the labve on the drive and mabey one of us can dig up an exact match and we can try an IDE controler card swap.

Yes, well, first do no harm, right?

I did just realize that probably all of my ingoing and outgoing email is on that drive (though I'm not sure--I'll have to see if I was keeping it in a different directory), so I'd like to hang on to that.

I'll try playing with cables and see if that gives me any joy, otherwise, I'll pull and preserve it, as suggested, thanks.

OK, jiggled cable, replaced cable. No change.

It's a Western Digital 136AA, EIDE, thirteen gig. I guess I'll pull it and go look for a replacement. Unfortunately, I don't need a big one, but it's hard to find small ones any more, so I'll end up spending more than I'd like, I'm sure.

Make sure there is no revision number like rev a or rev b silk screened on the printed circuit board.

The more info the better, even if it appears redundant.

I will put out some feelers but it might take a while for me to get a bite, please be paitent.

There is a "Rev A" foiled on the board. The full number is 60-600788-002 REV A, and there's a bar-code sticker on it with the number "788005E 30L365TPP80 0163"

The full model number is WD136AA-00AAA4, date of manufacture is November 5, 1999.

I've never heard any distressing sounds from it, so hopefully the platters are all right, as surmised.

Is this a common failure?

If there is data you want, here is what sometimes works:

Replace the drive with a new one, jumpered to be master. Jumper the old drive to be slave.

Put them both in and get an OS onto the new drive (or do that first, then hook up the old drive so there's no confusion when Windows wants to install).

Your "bad" drive may be accessible and even happily usable as a slave, but not a master. Copy the data that you need off of it!

Then it's up to you whether to retain or trust it as a slave. Been there, done that, have a drive that's been working fine for a couple years... as a slave. Can't be used as a master.

Then there is another trick I have never used but people swear by. Freeze it. Put it in a plastic back sealed tight and stick it in the freezer for a while to chill it way down. Hook it up, see if it boots enough to get the data off of it.

I have never done this, so you may want to Google for people who have, or for the exact advice.

Interesting theory. Only problem is that the drive was already a slave. The MBR is on a different drive.

Don't ask why (it's a legacy thing), but I was running W2K off of Drive F. C, D and E (where I keep a lot of data and an old W98 installation) are partitions on my master drive...

The freezer trick has worked for me in the past, but it was most effective back in the old days when they were still using stepper motors to move the heads. However, I used it about six months ago and was able to get some data off a dead laptop disk for our dean of technology.

What I'd do first is try to put an additional install of w2k or xp on that master disk if you've got the room for it. that'll get you booted in to something that'll be able to read the old disk, assuming the volume info and journal aren't fubar. Being able to read it, of course, means that you can copy files off of it. we used the same trick recently to get a bunch of data off my boss's machine when his disk crapped out.

good luck with it anyway.

Matt Fulghum

Well, I did boot off my master (or to be more accurate, off a Windows CD), into a DOS repair mode. It could see the F drive, but couldn't read it. I don't think that it will be amenable to anything except a hardware repair of some kind. I did see a used one on line for $37.00 that I could steal the logic board off of, but I'll wait a while and see what else turns up. It's not an urgent problem, because I have a couple other machines here, including one that's actually much faster, but I do want to eventually retrieve my email folders.

yeah, sounds like it. if the repair console couldn't see any structure, the disk is probably hosed. the one other thing I might try before disassembling the disk is this guy's linux password resetting disk; not for it's password functionality, but for the fact that it can read and write to NTFS disks.

It's not an NTFS disk. I kept it FAT when I put W2K on it because it was sharing a computer with a Win98 setup at the time, and I wanted to maintain the ability to see everything from both sides. As I said, there are legacy issues...

I suggest you create an image of the hard disk, it might be useful later for data recovery, particularly if the drive completely dies. In unix, you can usually use dd, otherwise, there are some DOS programs (I like Norton Ghost, use it in block copy mode).

Ummm...not that I'm opposed to the notion or anything, but...

How do you image a disk that isn't readable?

if its a dos formatted disk you might try SpinRite on it, I've had luck in rebuilding totally fubar HDs with it. http://grc.com

Over time the heads and tracks get out of alignment, it's a common problem. Much more common that logic boards. If your logic board was kaput, you would not read the HD, period. But if you are getting error, at least it's reading the platters...

I would think that if it were something occurring gradually over time, I'd have seen some symptoms earlier (occasional crashes, etc.). It went from working perfectly to not working at all literally over night.

There's one at Ebay, current bid, sixteen bucks. I don't know if it's the same rev, though--it's not possible to tell from the picture. It was built in July (four months before mine).

Remember, the drive size, model and revision must be an exact match and still, nothing is guranteed.

I will ask around.

Just treat your drive like someone in cryostasis, waiting future advanced technologies of sufficient quality to revive it :)

So, you're endorsing the freezer idea? ;-)

Actually, I don't have to wait for future technology. I'm pretty sure that current technology would revive it--I'm just too cheap (so far)...

Is the drive totally unreadable? I recently lost a drive which gave lots of recoverable errors (as in, if you tried to read a block it might have to retry a dozen tries before getting it) as well as a few unrecoverable errors. Imaging the drive gave me an opportunity to recover nearly everything. Unfortunately some of the hosed blocks were in the middle of large ZIP files...

Sam

I read your posting regarding your WD drive. I have the same drive with what seems to be a PC card with a dead short. Same part number you posted. Do you happen to have a good PC card or recommend where to get one?

Thanks

I have one, but I'm not sure whether or not it's good, because I haven't gotten around to trying it yet. I got in on a drive that I bought on Ebay. I'd recommend that, but you have to ask the seller to provide the serial number (including rev) on the logic controller. Also look for one with a manufacturing date close to yours. Be prepared to pay more than market. I underbid and lost the first one I found, but I figured that it was worth more to me than anyone else, so I bid fifty bucks for it and got it for forty something.

Great! Thanks for the tip. Can you tell me exactly how you searched to find the ones you found?

I don't recall exactly, but I think I did a search for "Western Digital 13GB"