Mail Archives: opendos/2001/03/14/04:31:44
Rob McGee,
Sounds like you lost your power supply.
You can check it by putting your hand
behind the power supply fan and checking
if there is any air blowing out from the fan
when the unit is turned on. No air flow
usually means not power supply. This seems
like a most possible since you had the classic
warning signs, which are not usually
associated with a disk failure, but can cause
problems with a disk. You can try swapping
another known good power supply in and
if it boots you know for sure.
Putting the drive in another computer without
ensuring that the exact same drive settings
were used from the original computer and
applied to the drive in the new computer might
cause the drive to lose its settings on the drive,
ie; C/H/S instead of LBA. I had that problem with
a Seagate drive about a year ago. I ending up
trashing the drive when it froze up completely.
Of course I was using M$ Windoze 3.11 over
PCDOS 7, which could have been part of the
problem .
Worst scenario: It is also possible there was a
power surge while you were out and the power
supply and hard drive were both toasted.
If that happened then your drive may not be
recoverable.
Good Luck, and invest in a good surge protector
and UPS. I don't know what they cost over there
but they are way less than a computer.
BOB 'DOMAN' MOSS "Eat some chocolate.
It is better than aspirin."
On Wed, 14 Mar 2001 00:29:26 -0600 Rob McGee <i812 AT iname DOT com> writes:
> ** This isn't even remotely DR-DOS related. But if anyone can figure
> out
> ** this problem, it would be you people. :) Replies off list would
> be
> ** very much appreciated. (Or on list if you think it's
> interesting.)
>
> This is indeed a puzzlement. Our eldest kid got a gift computer. It
> cruised along okay for months, despite a few warning signs: RAM
> failed
> POST, unable to warm reboot, didn't report disk size and free
> information as an SMB share. But it would easily go at least 1-3
> days
> between reboots, and considering it was running Win95 (OSR2) that is
> not
> too bad. So I blew off doing anything about the problems.
>
> Sometime yesterday, while unattended, it died. I had seen it running
> a
> screensaver in the morning. She came to do something in the
> afternoon
> but got no picture. When she turned it on for me I could tell it
> wasn't
> booting: no video initialization, not even a beep code error.
>
> I tried disconnecting everything but the video: cards, power &
> interface
> cables. I swapped the RAM. I swapped the video card. I swapped the
> CPU
> (yes, absolutely sure the jumpers were correct.) Still no flicker,
> still
> no beep. 'E's pinin' for the fjords. Beautiful bird, the Norwegian
> Blue.
>
> I put most of the same peripherals on a different motherboard with a
> different CPU and RAM. In getting it to work, physically, I found I
> could no longer access the hard drive. It's a WDC AC35100L which is
> C/H/S 10672/15/63, LBA'ed to 627/255/63. Identify drive from a Linux
> boot message says "10085040 sectors (5164MB)".
>
> DOS fdisk said: "C: partition 1, active, PRI DOS type, no volume
> label,
> 4918MB, system unknown, usage 100%." It goes on to say the total
> disk
> space is 4910MB, 8 less than the partition. That sounds odd.
> Figuring
> "(sectors * 512) / 1024^2" I get 4924.3359MB.
>
> I had a CD of Norton Util. 95 v. 2 (FAT32-aware) and tried ndd.exe.
> It
> offered to try to recover a partition of 812MB. I declined the offer
> and
> tried diskedit.exe instead. The first 63 sectors were all 0's. (63
> spt,
> of course. Is that normal?)
>
> The 64th sector showed what looked to my untrained eye like some
> filesystem information. There was a string "FAT32" and the volume
> label
> as it was before the crash. I asked diskedit to try to create a
> virtual
> filesystem of this, and again, it offered something in the 800MB
> range.
> Furthermore it said it would be FAT16. But that's not right, it was
> all
> in one big FAT32 partition.
>
> I tried changing some of the parameters around, but could not find
> anything that worked. Since I really don't know what I am doing I
> feel
> like I'm looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Somewhere
> along in there I tried "fdisk /mbr" too.
>
> Finally this afternoon I came up with the hypothesis of a disk
> geometry
> mismatch. That some parameters had been manually entered in the dead
> motherboard's CMOS settings, and they weren't quite correct, but
> close
> enough that the drive went along with it.
>
> Does this hypothesis sound right? If so is there anywhere I might be
> able to find a clue about the disk geometry parameters used? I'm
> afraid
> that my "fdisk /mbr" might have rendered the thing unbootable
> though.
>
> It's nothing major, but if there's any way to recover this I sure
> would
> like to do it.
>
> If you read this far, thank you for your time. If not, I'm sorry for
> the
> disruption. :)
>
> Rob - /dev/rob0
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