Nooooooooooo!!!!

[Babalyon 5]

NOOOOOOOO!!!!! There I was, 1am in the morning, doing a nice little piccy of Lagoons & Triffids(starting to look lovely), when my camera started to go funny. A bit of dew. No worries, hair dryer will cure that! Ok, now screen still not clear, slew to bright object, can just pick out Rigel Kenta. Hmmm! Computer goes click, whoosh, click, whoa, scary. Adjust camera settings a bit(DSI Pro 2), mmm, still no image!! Next thing is I get the blue screen of death, begins physical memory dump, but not dumping!! MMMM! Wont switch off now either. Had no choice but to hold in the power button until it went off. Now it wont load anything, tells me boot disk failed. When I tried a recovery on the Mandraiva system, it says there is no bootloader, and no hard disk. When I tried an old Win 2000 disk, it gets through loading up, then when I ask it to install, it says no hard disks found!! Also, hard drive light is on very faintly, but flashes like its working when I try to boot or load a system install. I think the hard drive has pooped itself!! That means Ive lost the lot!!!! Oh well, looks like I'll be buying a new hard disk, not a mod on my camera. Spewing!!

[Dooghan (Dooghan)]

All is not lost. Can the BIOS still see the HDD. If so then you could run a program called Spinrite to fix the problem. I've had it fix a very similar problem to what you've got. It took a few hours but it fixed it. I also went and got a new HDD and copied everything over to it. I wasn't happy to rely on the old drive any more.

[Babalyon 5]

I dont know. I think so as all the boot up screens are the same. Will look into it or transfer it to physical drive to another computer as a slave unit and se what I can do from there. Thanks for the tip!!

[Babalyon 5]

The hard drive must have seized! Lol! It wasn't being recognized by anything and when listening to it with the sides off, I thought, mmmm, sounds like its seized or not spinning. Being highly technical and computer gifted, I decided that the best course of action was to hit it with my screwdriver handle! What do you know? All good, it sprang into life and delivered my back to the world of imaging!! I ordered a 1 terabyte drive today and burnt all the good stuff to a dvd.

[erick (Eric)]

Yes, rule #1 of DIY - when in doubt (or in anger), hit it with a hammer!

Well done!

[telemarker (Keith)]

Ahh, the wonders of percussive maintenance.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Don'tcha just love modern IT repair techniques.

[renormalised (Carl)]

Sounds like the armature stuck to the drive platters. The little knock got you going again, but I'd get about transferring stuff onto your new drive as fast as I could. It's on it's way out.

[madtuna (Steve)]

my mum could fix anything from a flat battery, flat tyre, broken tv to a missbehaving child by smacking it with her shoe!

[Craig.a.c (Craig)]

Originally Posted by madtuna

my mum could fix anything from a flat battery, flat tyre, broken tv to a missbehaving child by smacking it with her shoe!

Sounds just like my mum, only she used a wooden spoon.

[Babalyon 5]

[reddiablo (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by telemarker

Ahh, the wonders of percussive maintenance.

Thats a keeper!

[tornado33]

If you have access to another PC could plug the drive in as a slave and see if you can at least get the stuff you want off it, or if you have access to a USB drive external enclosure could plug that into a pc and see if the drive can be accessed. What make and model is the drive?
Scott

[Babalyon 5]

After I hit it with my screwdriver, it has been working long enough for me to burn all my data to dvd's. Im just finishing up installing a new 1 Tera byte drive and a new copy of Windows XP SP2. Nearly got all the software finished. Mainly just gotta plug all the hardware in and make sure the drivers install properly, then I can sit back and image the clouds
Thanks for the help!!