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…to recover data from a damaged drive did not work for me this time. I wrote about my hard drive dying and losing some family pictures last week. One of the tricks used to recover is to stick your broken driven in the freezer over night. The theory is that the metal parts will contract enough to be able to sue the drive temporarily, long enough to grab your last data from the drive.
Note: Put drive in ziplock freezer bag to avoid moisture. I will note that I did do this and still got a lot of condensation on the drive when I pulled it out. There was enough water there to worry me.

This operation was not a success and patient died.

I have also heard of people doing the same thing by sticking drive in oven on low temperature. This seems very weird to me. Not sure why you woudl want metal and part to expand.
At any rate- drive gone.

Tags: Computer and Hardware by Lisa Stewart
3 Comments »

I am having computer week from hell. After horrible upgrade this week to top it all off an external drive started making nasty clanking sound when I turned it on. was working perfectly 2 days ago and no signs of trouble. Last night my hard started making a ominous clanking sound. Its like a “clack clack clack” and must be platters banging around. GULP.

We have had this drive for about 3 years. It has all my photos on it. I am an idiot. Almost 200 gigs of family photos. Just writing about it makes me want to cry. Its not a matter of getting the drive recognized. the hard drives spins and then stops after about 1 minute.
I tried to yank drive out and connect directly to PC and still a problem. My one last attempt it to put in in freezer over night.
Did I just say I was putting my failed hard drive in freezer? yes.
This is an old trick. It has never worked for me but I am DESPERATE. My hard drive is in deep freeze.
In am I will grab it quickly and connect and if it works will grab as much data as I can. I have very little hope that this will work but I do know some people who swear by the hard drive in freezer method.
I may have to look at big bucks to pay some one to do it for me.
I would be thrilled to hear of ways to recover data from a dead drive, please feel free to share.
Note: ALL I told you so comments that mention I should have backed will be go in my pile of Bad Karma folder.

Tags: Computer and Hardware by Lisa Stewart
2 Comments »

Yes. This was nto always true. I stuck with only VIA chip sets for years only because I wanted tio use old drives in new motherboards.

Put Old SATA Drive Into New Computer

Yesterday I swapped out the new SATA drive on a new computer and put in my “old” drive from older machine. The older PC is an Athlon and new is Pentium Dual Core . Old had windows XP and new oneVista.
In my mind I thought it wold go pretty well and I had a slight fever which explains why I didn’t back everything up and I DID panicked halfway through. This was one of those times when it DID go well.
I took out the old sata drive- with all my stuff, Windows XP o/s installed, all my applications, email, EVERYTHING.. I removed the new drive in new PC . I popped in old drive. I got my Windows Xp intsall disc ready ( must be bootable) and put it in dvd drive. I powered up and chose upgrade option. 30 minutes later my old computer was new again. So far zero issues.
Was seamless.

I had no problems with RAID controllers, etc. All I did was upgrade and I have my old drive installed with all my stuff on it in the new machine. Works perfectly.
I am not that crazy about the new machine- it is faster and smaller however there is no IDE connection on the motherboard at all- new burner is SATA as well. Means I can’t swap out dead and dying drives with ones that are lying around.
I haven’t looked closely but also I don’t see a spot for Floppy drive on motherboard… which I only need.. when I REALLY need it.

In some weird twist of fate, I thought would take me same amount of time to put in the new drive to old computer for kids and was a DISASTER. Spent hours trying to get it to work. My biggest issue was loss of power when I connected IDE cables to hard drive or DVD drive. I was able to fix by resetting CMOS.

I have all ready come across a problem not have IDE connection. One of my external drives failed today ( co-incidence??) and this is heart wrenching.

Tags: Computer and Hardware by Lisa Stewart
1 Comment »

I am back in computer hell. Why do i do this to myself. I suppose I like the challenge of solving a puzzle and.or its my OCD. I cannot stop until things are FIXED and working.

A friend gave me a one month old Dell desktop so I decided to change computers. What I thought would be hard was in fact easy and the easy part was painful.
Was was easy was swapping new SATA drive with old one.
What was PAINFUL and beyond ridiculous was basic install in my “old” PC. BIOS would not recognize SATA drive and no power to DVD burner or IDE hard drive drive when I connected them to IDE cable.

I actually ended up working on it until 4 am .. and boy am I paying for it today. I went to sleep with problem still not solved. Swapped out Power supply- which I had convinced myself was the problem. I was rummaging around in garage at 2am looking for old power supply.At first I just had issues getting new SATA drive recognised and then gave up with that and just used an IDE drive. The things started getting flaky. No power for DVD drive. Switched to another drive, still an issue. Changed cables, Double checked cables.
Noticed I had power on my dvd rom when it was just power connected and not IDE ribbon cable connected. The same thing with HDD. As soon as I connected an IDE cable power was lost.
At point I lost all power to the board which turned out to be a cable I knocked out.
How did I know it was not a fried mother board? I pulled out everything .. everything.. CPU, RAM, video cards, etc. EVERYTHING and powered up and no problems getting to BIOS.
How I fixed problem of now power to dvd drive ? I reset the CMOS. Not a scary sounding as you might think.

How To Reset CMOS on Motherboard

Resetting the CMOS solved problem instantly. To reset CMOS or clear CMOS is fairly straightforward. Find your motherboard manual and look for CMOS jumper position on the motherboard. If you can;t find manual look for 3 little pins with a jumper on it near battery on your motherboard. You will have the jumper on ( most likely) pins 1 and 2. The jumper looks like the same one on dvd and cd rom when you set up to master/slave.
Make sure power is off and in fact I would unplug your power to PC connection. Discharge yourself by touching metal case.
With power OFF move jumper from first two pins to last 2 pins ( so from pins 1,2 to 2,3) . Wait about 15 seconds. Move it back. You are done!
Connect your hard drive or DVD drive to power and IDE cable and you should be back in business. Add peripherals one at a time.

After I successful installed my old Windows XP SATA drive with everything on it into new machine. Then after the horrible install one of my external drives failed. The one with all our family pictures on it. I am pretty upset and grasping at straws on recovery the data on it.

Tags: Computer and Hardware by Lisa Stewart
3 Comments »