Hard drive dead?

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 8:41 am

Got a dell that I picked up the other day and the hard drive is kinda kooky. I can see it in the bios and it will show in the post if I hook into my pc. Now when I get into windows it doesnt show at all. Thats hooking it up as a secondary drive. If I hook it up as primary it will still show in the bios and post but it wont boot into windows. It comes up to a norton go back screen, then onto the xp screen then it reboots. It will continue this cycle until you turn it off. The lady who owns it works for the school board so she has a lot of stuff she needs to keep but she has shot herself in the foot and never made a backup of anything.

My question is, does it sound like the drive is dead or dying or could it be the norton has got in screwed up somehow? Or is there a program I can use to try and retrieve the data. A free program would be nice since im doing this as a favor to her and I dont want to be out any money. I need some help guys. Keeping this lady happy will earn some brownie points for sure

Executioner · Post by **Executioner** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 8:56 am

If you have SpinRite, I would run that utility to see if it can recover any possible bad sectors on the drive.

eGoCeNTRoNiX · Post by **eGoCeNTRoNiX** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 8:56 am

You may have to go into disk management and assign it a drive letter. Hope this helps!

eGo

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 9:09 am

Ok so how do I go about assigning it a drive letter if I cant see it?

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 9:34 am

I d/l'd spinrite to give it a try. Any tips on using it?

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 10:11 am

If this is what I think it is, someone tried to backup the drive with Norton Ghosst & norton created a boot partition to run the backup. Problem is that if the backup fails, it doesn't delete the boot partition & so it keeps trying to boot into... what is it? Dr. DOS I think & failing & trying again.

Anyhow, if you boot the computer into DOS with a flash drive or floppy, then you just need to run fdisk & delete the first partition. Or you can just make the 2nd one active. Make sure, however, that it is the first partition that is a norton partition. It'll only be a couple MB.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 10:21 am

First of all, DO NOT DO ANYTHING to this drive until you read the rest of this. If Norton Go-Back is installed, you will screw up the drive if you try to mess with the MBR or the partition.

You CANNOT see a partition in Windows or DOS that has Norton Go-Back on it. It shows up as a non-standard partition and is unreadable by Windows or DOS unless Norton Go-Back is installed and running on that PC. This is why I don't like Go-Back. It works like the awful disk manager apps we used to use in the old days to allow old PCs to see large drives. It alters the drive so that you can't even format it and use it again until Go-Back is uninstalled from the boot partition (it will survive a format).

In order to run ANY recovery utility on the drive that needs to read the partition (except Spinrite which does not need to understand what's in the partition) you need to boot the drive from the computer it's installed on, press the appropriate key during the Go-Back countdown in the beginning and select the option to "Boot from a CD" or "Boot from a Floppy" or whatever. This causes the Go-Back manager to be run first and loaded into memory, which makes the partition visible and then whatever utility you run can then see the partition normally.

Spinrite is an exception - you don't need to load Go-Back because Spinrite actually works at the drive's sector level. It doesn't care what the partition is (Linux, NTFS, Mac OS, drives from Goa'uld space shitps, or whatever whatever format your Tivo uses) nor does it need to read it or understand it. It's just forcing the drive's ECC routines to examine each individual sector (at level 2) or reading and writing back (level 4) and recovering the data and repairing or swapping out the bad sector if necessary. This is all done at the internal BIOS level of the hard drive itself.

So to recover or backup any data before doing anything else, I would recommend connecting a USB flash or hard drive, booting to the Go-Back menu and selecting "Boot from CD" and boot into a CD based OS like BartPE or (better yet) The Ultimate Windows Boot CD and then copy the Documents folder and anything else to the USB drive if you can.

Then reboot and use Spinrite level 2 to see if you can fix the drive (if it has bad sectors).

If that doesn't bring it back, it might be a registry issue and just using Go-Back to restore to an earlier save point might fix it (Go-Back works like System Restore but better, although it has a pretty stiff performance penalty which is another reason I don't like it).

If that doesn't work then you may need to try an XP Repair Install (but again, you need to use the Go-Back menu to first load Go-Back and THEN boot from the CD otherwise the Windows installer won't see a valid partition).

You can also disable Go-Back from the Go-Back menu which reverts the partition back to a normal partition (which can now be seen from Windows as a spare drive on another PC) but be aware this nukes all the Go-Back save points. I usually do this when working on a system with Go-Back on it because that crap just gets in the way, and sometimes it's Go-Back itself that becomes corrupt. You can always turn it back on again later when you're done if the customer wants to use it.

Hope this helps...

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 12:12 pm

Thanks for the great info guys. I tried running the repair option ( i think) in go back but it wouldnt work. Tell you what..let me hook that system back up and see exactly what im getting then ill report back

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Fri Jul 25, 2008 2:15 pm

If it's what I'm talking about, repair won't work, because the windows partition is no longer the active partition.

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Sat Jul 26, 2008 10:16 am

I was able to disable the go back autoprotect or whatever its called and finally got to the point where i would run chkdisk. It ran through that a few times and i came and it was sitting at the log in screen. I dont know how or what I did or maybe I didnt but i got that far anyway. I made a boot disk with the spinrite but it wouldnt do anything. Not sure if i didnt do it right or if the pc was acting funny. Either way I need to get her backed up and goin again. Prolly bew sunday before I can get back to it so ill let u guys know then. Thanks for all the help gentlemen.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jul 26, 2008 1:00 pm

You need to run the factory advanced diagnostic on the drive and see if it passes or not. If it doesn't then you're wasting time. Backup her data and get her a new drive.

Spinrite might STILL revive it, but it'll just fail again in a month or two. Never trust a drive that fails the factory diagnostic.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Sat Jul 26, 2008 3:18 pm

You know, I never had issues with GoBack when it was an Adaptec product, once Symantec gets their hands on stuff, they tend to screw it up bad...

As FP said, if it fails factory diagnostic and nothing important is on there, the only thing to do is write zeroes to the drive with their utility. Sometimes that actually fixes the issues with the drive, sometimes it is only temporary.