Digital BW, The Print

Hi Tony

Tony Sleep <TonySleep@...> wrote:

> **
>
> What kind of crash Paul? If it still spins up, is not making unhealthy
> noises such as bearing gring or click of death (heads cannot calibrate ,
> and is detected by the BIOS, there is a very good chance of easy recovery.
>

I suspect the disc is still usable.  There were no weird noises.  Most of
the sectors are still readable according to checkdisc.  Unfortunately, the
unreadable ones include the boot sector.  So, I have saved the disc in
hopes that I'll be able to use it as a second/data disc in the box.
 Unfortunately, the Dell tech people do not seem to be up to the task.  (In
fact, the 70% drop in Dell profit this last quarter is not a surprise at
all.  If they had actually stocked their shelves with parts and paid the
license fees to MS and others, the reported results would probably be much
worse.)



>
> If the disk appears in the BIOS, but does not mount in the OS, the problem
> is nearly always a corrupted MBR and/or partition table. The drivers and
> OS cannot recognise the corrupt sector 0 as a drive.
>

That goes a bit over my head, but when the "bad" disc was still in, the
diagnostics registered 2 SATA devices, which I assume was the C:/ drive and
the CD/DVD drive.  And, as I said, many if not most of the sectors were
reported as readable.  It appears the system is capable of 4 SATA devices.

What I probably need is the knowledge of how to get the disc back in the
box as a non-boot disc (I have a new C:/ drive that boots well), and I'll
probably need to know how to "cure" or work around the issues
that caused this.

I might add that for months before the disc "crashed" (could not boot), it
was attempting and failing to configure updates, presumably to Windows 7.
 The Dell tech people said this often precedes what they view as hard disc
failures.


>
> In 90% of cases everything can be recovered without data loss. The disk
> can be returned to service as there is almost always nothing wrong with it
> at a hardware level.
>

That would be nice, as my total restore from my Seagate backup did not
restore the software, Photoshop included.



> It was only corrupted in the first place by
> software/OS/drivers and/or power loss.
>

There are always warnings not to unplug a computer during the update
installations.  I have wondered if a blip in the power at one of these
times was behind it.  I don't have one of those devices that keeps the
power going at such times, and being in a rural area, the power grid is
prone to some very brief outages.

.
>
> Provided you can get driverless access to them, ...
>

Can you translate this for a non-techie?

It sounds like I have a good shot at this if I can find a good roadmap.

Thanks for the advice.  It is generally consistent with lay assumptions.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com


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