Hardrive not accessible

[rnparhi]

Hi Frens,
Thanks for reading this post.
I am coming back to this forum after quite sometime and that obviously means I have a problem!
I have my own assembled PC which has both WIN98SE and Linux loaded with Dual boot. It was working fine and I had left it with a friend when I went out of country recently. I don't know what has happened, but, the system does not boot now. After listing all the PCI devices during booup, it hangs for sometime, I see prolonged Harddisk activity and after 3-4 minutes, get a message that could not boot from disk and insert boot disk.

What I have tried and the results are as follows.
1. booted from floppy. OK. Able to list C: contents but not reading D:
2. Bios auto detection of HD is OK.
3. If I try FDISK, along with the first menu, I get a flashing message that 'could not access drive 1' and I have to exit Fdisk.
4. tried booting Linux from a floppy, but, it falied saying could not load root filesystem or something similar.
5. I have checked cables etc and all is OK.

I am not sure if the HD has conked off or is it some problem with the boot sector.

Can someone tell me if there is a way to check the health of HD in the current situation that I am in? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks,

Ram

[ski]

You can try replacing the master boot record by inserting the Windows boot floppy, select 'Start Windows w/o CD-ROM Support', press Enter, type C at the A:\> prompt, press Enter, type fdisk /mbr at the C:\> prompt, press Enter.
If no luck, then replace the system files using the Windows boot floppy, select the same option as above, type sys c: at the A:\> prompt.

[Rick]

Not knowing what has been done to this system while you were away
I’d start by double checking everything including the drive jumper settings. ( Master - Slave)
Check the correct pin alignment on the data cables (Pin1 to Pin1)

In the Bios you say it will detect correctly One drive or does this system have 2?
If only one and it shows C only from a boot floppy disk then your partition table may be corrupted .

If Fdisk is unable to access the drive 1 Then your bios isn’t detecting it Or you have 2 drives installed and it is only reading one correctly at boot

What Boot loader were you using when you had it setup and running? LILO , Grub or other ?
You may need to reinstall the loader

Running the sys c: will cause the old boot loader to fail
Running fdisk /mbr will also cause the boot loader to fail

If you are able to.
Try Booting from your Linux CD
Use the advanced options to install, select partitions and partition the drive
Use the partition view option to see the drive and all it’s partitions

Look for empty or unassigned partitions
You may need to reinstall linux or just the boot loader if the drive(s) are detected and active

To check the physical health of the drive.
Check the web site for that Brand Drive for the testing utility.

If you have a Virus scanner on write protected Floppy or CD
I’d also suggest running that

[classicsoftware]

Go to the web site of the hard drive manufacturer and download their diagnostic software.

test the drive.

If it fails, you may save some warranty left on it.....

Good luck...

p.s. since it cant boot from either OS I suspect the drive is failing.

Do not delay test the drive.

p.s.s.: I hope you backed up

[rnparhi]

Hi Frens,
Thanks for your replies. What I tried yesterday night was the following (with the results).


1. Booted from Floppy and tried to format C:. The checkings went fine but at the end gave a message that can't read partition table and format was aborted.

2. Did a scandisk for C. Got lot of strong warnings on possible errors and after lot of hesitation went ahead with it. It went to Surface scan and just after probably the logical end of C: (in my 20 Gigs HD, 10 Gigs was C, 5 Gigs was D and rest was Linux Partition), it started giving messages about data being corrupt and upon choosing Fixit, it started marking them as Bad clusters. I interrupted soon after because otherwise half the drive would have been marked as Bad sector may be.

Scandisk ended with error that may be my Drive is not having LBA support.
3. I tried loading setup defaults in BIOS but did not help.

I am going to try use Partition Magic today to see if it can make some sense in the mess. May be after scandisk, things would have become messier. I have a feeling that the FAT is screwed up badly but probably the drive is OK. I will try to look up for some SW to test my Quantum Fireball HD. If you have a ready link, pls do share. Thanks again,

Answers to some questions raised: I was using LILO. I tried Fdisk/mbr but it falied saying could not write MBR. I have one physical drive only. It is on Pri IDE. I am sure about the pin alignment. I have not checked the Jumper settings but I guess had it been wrong, it would have come up during bootup. I will check it anyway.

rnparhi

[Rick]

The hard drive segment of Quantum is now in the hands of Maxtor
http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm
You’ll need to go to their sit for a drive testing utility
I’m not sure if they have one that works in dos from a floppy
From what I read they have a windows version ( Worthless in your case)

Regardless of what you do to the drive.
If the Linux partition is Not accessible Lilo will not load
Only part of that Boot loader is stored in the MBR

If the Boot sector , Partition table and or Fat is corrupt
Partition magic will also fail.
If you can find one on the Maxtor site,
Grab a zero fill Utility and have it write Zero’s to the complete drive
Unfortunately You’ll loose everything stored on the drive
But at this point it’s lost already.

If that fails It’s time to look for a warranty replacement.

[rnparhi]

Thanks Rick..After quite some tries, I have downloaded the powerquest.exe, tool from Maxtor which has some options which are both informative and destructive..I am going to try out the same and in the worst case try a low level formatting. I will probably take this opportunity to some experiments on the HD which usually is not possible :) Thank God that I invested in CDRW backup. Will update with the results...Thanks.

rnparhi.

[rnparhi]

Hi,
Just to update on the issue. Powermax.exe detected my Quantum drive but did not run any tests be coz it was Non-Maxtor.

Partition Magic also gave error #121 meaning not able to read the first sector of the drive, as rightly anticipated by Rick.

So, now it is time to contact Support. Is the Debug feature of MS DOS useful to do a drive cleanup. I think it is possible to remove all partitions with Debug script. Is it worth a try?

rnparhi

[Rick]

At this Point it may well be your only option
However You should not be surprised to find that Even Debug may fail with the same results.

If the Drive is in fact suffering from physical damage to the disk surface

[rnparhi]

Hi,
I changed the cable and then tried to do a low level format using maxtor utility powermax.exe 3.04 version and it went thru. Now, my drive is up and running. Don't know if the problem was with the cable.

Is there any issue if my HD is on secondary IDE as Master and my CDROM as slave also on secondary IDE cable and the Primary is left unused?

rnparhi

[Sylvander]

Hello mparhi

Best to have your HDD as Primary Master and CD-ROM as Secondary Master.
Since they are then on different IDE controllers they can run concurrently and simultaneously and the HDD does not spend any time waiting for the CD-ROM to finish.

When you put the CD-ROM as slave to the HDD, the HDD must wait [idle] while the CD-ROM is given it's time to do it's work. Since the CD-ROM is much slower than the HDD the waiting time will be relatively great.

I assume there are no IDE drives additional to these.