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Kirin 01 - portrait

And now - a hard drive failure!

I got home from work tonight and found my monitor dark and there was no reaction from the computer when I tried to "wake it up" from the power saver mode.

I turned it off and now get a Primary Disk Failure message and very little else.

It's a Western Digital 120Gig drive. Best Buy installed it when I bought the machine, as the original drive seemed to be defective (I have it too, it wasn't defective) I do have a service contract, but I leave for
Memphis at 0830 so I can do nothing until I get back on Monday. The machine is an Alienware Area 51.

I'm running XP Pro and I have the CD and also the WD diagnostic floppy.

Any suggestions before I turn it over to the monkeys at the Best Buy service department next week?

Posted on Sep. 2nd, 2004 at 11:07 pm | | Leave a comment | 6 comments |

Comments


le_loup_peint

Sorry about the hard drive. I wish I could be helpful.

Have fun at MFM

*hug*
Posted on Sep. 2nd, 2004 11:12 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

raja_laba_laba

Before you take it in, I'd suggest having a quick look inside. You'd be surprised how often seemingly major break downs can be fixed by simply re-seating the connectors. They can sometimes shake loose inside a computer due to heat and vibration.
Posted on Sep. 3rd, 2004 01:43 am (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

smrgol_t_kirin

I've been "playing" with it just now.

The original Seagate 120gig drive works fine in the machine as a master.

The 120gig WD blocks the machine from seeing either drive when installed as master or slave.

The 180gig WD slave drive is OK.

At this point I'd ust like to get the 120WD drive working to remove data.
Posted on Sep. 3rd, 2004 06:22 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

skipai

Bleh. Tech these days don't last long. Anyways, yeah sometimes even changing to a another working IDE cable may work as sometimes cables can go tits up. Especially those thinner 80 wire ones.

Running the WD drive utilities to scan the entire disk and mark bad sectors as bad so that the drive can be used if only briefly to get data off it (You have to do that as quickly as you boot up) to another drive.

But HD crashes are a pain in the rear... x.x
Posted on Sep. 3rd, 2004 07:00 am (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

murrrmaiyd

I can't argue with what Berin said about Western Digital...I bought one for my old computer so I could have a larger hard drive, since the old one was quite small, and while I had had the old one for years and it worked perfectly, the Western Digital fried itself, losing me most of my data, within the first year and a half that I had it. Luckily I had just bought a new computer when that happened, so it didn't leave me computerless, but I DO wish I could still use the old one at least for the files that were still on it.

Mur
Posted on Sep. 3rd, 2004 08:20 am (UTC) | | Thread | Reply

twoolfe

YES.. If it spins up at all. Find a friend with a working systme and the disk tools from chkdsk to Norton disk doctor. Mount the drive in his pooter. Chant and wave the rubber chicken over it while attempting to copy to another drive.. I salvaged most of a bad drive that way.
HUGGZ and good luck
T.
Posted on Sep. 3rd, 2004 04:40 pm (UTC) | | Thread | Reply