COMPUTER HELP!!!
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COMPUTER HELP!!!
by Grumsh » Fri Feb 17, 2006 4:57 am
- Grumsh
- Posts: 5
- Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2006 4:41 am
by Thantu » Sat Feb 18, 2006 6:40 am
God I used to love these stories when I was a commissioned bench tech. Plug and pray = another week of groceries. Probably not the area for this, but I'm going to help you anyhow, because I've degraded you enough to satisfy my own needs, and I'm sure you've had enough of people telling you how screwed you are.
Aight, here's the deal about how screwed you are: SATA devices by nature pretend to be SCSI. IDE devices (your old hard drive), ALWAYS take boot priority over SCSI. Even when you tell it not to, it still wants to pretend that the IDE device you plug in is C:, though if you know where to go in Computer Management area of your administrator tools (which you can't do since you have no OS), it would be mostly workable. Don't feel too bad really, I once I had a system administrator spend six hours on the phone with Dell support because he'd plugged a USB thumb drive into the back of a server, forgotten about it, and on reboot, kept getting a "No fixed Disk" message because the system thought it was IDE and was giving it boot priority. Yoink; works now bud. Slap.
First things first. Make sure all your fancy new toys are using 48bit LBA so that your new large hard drive doesn't blow a gasket in a few months after you write to a non-partitioned area (more on this at 48bitlba.com).
Options:
1. Moved this one up to 1 (even though I thought of it last) due to simplicity. Boot from your Windows cd (you never did mention your OS, so I'm assuming XP, hope that's correct and that you have a legal copy handy), and select the "repair" option. This might fix enough to at least get you a bootable OS (don't bother re-activating this copy since you just want it long enough to back up your stuff). If it doesn't, just do a non-destructive reinstall of Windows from the cd (as in, under no condition let it format the drive); either to a different directory, or to the same directory (c:\windows) overtop of the crapped out OS. Once you get what you want onto a safer media, wipe it and start fresh.
2. Rebuild the old pc and back it up first (if you are a psycho like me, this basically would only really entail ripping out the power supply and booting up the board and video card on the kitchen table, well ok, I'd only rip out the supply if the cables wouldn't strech, ha - not advised to static, cats, and liquid spill issues). Then start over.
3. Get yourself a Bart or PE boot disk from someone technical that has a Norton Ghost on it (or in a pinch, Acronis True Image). You'll also want the lil' Ghost Explorer program that allows you to read Ghost images. The cd will save you a hell of a lot of trouble, especially if the tech person actually knows what they are doing (30% chance) and has slipstreamed it to SP2 and dropped some useful utilities on it (hopefully but doubtfully licensed). Boot the cd into Windows (make sure you are booting from the cd, you may also be required to press a key on some images), and Ghost all your data onto the new drive which you should already have partitioned and formatted (NOTE: Be sure you know which partition is which! Fdisk does some freaky things with logical partitions and drive letters, making it real easy to plow over those family photos). Then when the new drive is all loaded up, you can just Ghost Explorer the image to your heart's content and pick out all your e-mail, docs, pictures, and whatnot. Heck while you are at it, run a nice virus scan from a different OS (the cd) for good measure.
4. If you can't get a hold of some sort of other boot media, best case scenario is to F8 the boot process, drop it to a dos box, and attempt to xcopy32 *.* /h/i/c/k/e/r/y everything on the main drive to a second partition of the new drive (in other words, split the new drive into two partitions and copy everything from one to the second partition, and then just load a fresh copy of your OS onto the first partition of the new drive). You are supposed to get long file names, but you won't, and it is freakishly drive intensive. If there's anything wrong with the old drive, or your controller sucks, expect it to bomb out and force you to start all over at least once.
5. Being really careful with the drive (at least put it in an anti- static bag if nothing else), loan it to a friend (assuming you don't have any, ahem, "personal" family photos), and have them burn it to a DvD (or six).
6. Barring that, just pretend for a while that the old drive doesn't exist. Make a nice, fresh, clean system and get it all good to go. If you are really lucky, your BIOS has a setting to make the SATA drives to pretend to be IDE (some do), locking the new drive down as C. If it does, great, choose that and then plug in the old drive, copy of what you want off, and play hero for a while ("I" cleaned the toilet, babe; gimme love!). If it doesn't, you could attempt another, "God I hope it boots of the right drive" plug-in (sometimes the system figures it out). If that doesn't fly, throw a tantrum, and then try one of the other steps.
7. Buy another power supply and NIC (assuming your old board doesn't have a network port), and then just set the old pc up long enough to network it to the new one, copying all of your stuff over (this also assumes you have some sort of hub, switch, router, or "shudder" a cross-over cable).
Aight, here's the deal about how screwed you are: SATA devices by nature pretend to be SCSI. IDE devices (your old hard drive), ALWAYS take boot priority over SCSI. Even when you tell it not to, it still wants to pretend that the IDE device you plug in is C:, though if you know where to go in Computer Management area of your administrator tools (which you can't do since you have no OS), it would be mostly workable. Don't feel too bad really, I once I had a system administrator spend six hours on the phone with Dell support because he'd plugged a USB thumb drive into the back of a server, forgotten about it, and on reboot, kept getting a "No fixed Disk" message because the system thought it was IDE and was giving it boot priority. Yoink; works now bud. Slap.
First things first. Make sure all your fancy new toys are using 48bit LBA so that your new large hard drive doesn't blow a gasket in a few months after you write to a non-partitioned area (more on this at 48bitlba.com).
Options:
1. Moved this one up to 1 (even though I thought of it last) due to simplicity. Boot from your Windows cd (you never did mention your OS, so I'm assuming XP, hope that's correct and that you have a legal copy handy), and select the "repair" option. This might fix enough to at least get you a bootable OS (don't bother re-activating this copy since you just want it long enough to back up your stuff). If it doesn't, just do a non-destructive reinstall of Windows from the cd (as in, under no condition let it format the drive); either to a different directory, or to the same directory (c:\windows) overtop of the crapped out OS. Once you get what you want onto a safer media, wipe it and start fresh.
2. Rebuild the old pc and back it up first (if you are a psycho like me, this basically would only really entail ripping out the power supply and booting up the board and video card on the kitchen table, well ok, I'd only rip out the supply if the cables wouldn't strech, ha - not advised to static, cats, and liquid spill issues). Then start over.
3. Get yourself a Bart or PE boot disk from someone technical that has a Norton Ghost on it (or in a pinch, Acronis True Image). You'll also want the lil' Ghost Explorer program that allows you to read Ghost images. The cd will save you a hell of a lot of trouble, especially if the tech person actually knows what they are doing (30% chance) and has slipstreamed it to SP2 and dropped some useful utilities on it (hopefully but doubtfully licensed). Boot the cd into Windows (make sure you are booting from the cd, you may also be required to press a key on some images), and Ghost all your data onto the new drive which you should already have partitioned and formatted (NOTE: Be sure you know which partition is which! Fdisk does some freaky things with logical partitions and drive letters, making it real easy to plow over those family photos). Then when the new drive is all loaded up, you can just Ghost Explorer the image to your heart's content and pick out all your e-mail, docs, pictures, and whatnot. Heck while you are at it, run a nice virus scan from a different OS (the cd) for good measure.
4. If you can't get a hold of some sort of other boot media, best case scenario is to F8 the boot process, drop it to a dos box, and attempt to xcopy32 *.* /h/i/c/k/e/r/y everything on the main drive to a second partition of the new drive (in other words, split the new drive into two partitions and copy everything from one to the second partition, and then just load a fresh copy of your OS onto the first partition of the new drive). You are supposed to get long file names, but you won't, and it is freakishly drive intensive. If there's anything wrong with the old drive, or your controller sucks, expect it to bomb out and force you to start all over at least once.
5. Being really careful with the drive (at least put it in an anti- static bag if nothing else), loan it to a friend (assuming you don't have any, ahem, "personal" family photos), and have them burn it to a DvD (or six).
6. Barring that, just pretend for a while that the old drive doesn't exist. Make a nice, fresh, clean system and get it all good to go. If you are really lucky, your BIOS has a setting to make the SATA drives to pretend to be IDE (some do), locking the new drive down as C. If it does, great, choose that and then plug in the old drive, copy of what you want off, and play hero for a while ("I" cleaned the toilet, babe; gimme love!). If it doesn't, you could attempt another, "God I hope it boots of the right drive" plug-in (sometimes the system figures it out). If that doesn't fly, throw a tantrum, and then try one of the other steps.
7. Buy another power supply and NIC (assuming your old board doesn't have a network port), and then just set the old pc up long enough to network it to the new one, copying all of your stuff over (this also assumes you have some sort of hub, switch, router, or "shudder" a cross-over cable).
The Mighty Thantu of Mithaniel Marr
- Thantu
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