Greetings all,
Here's the deal.
I come home one night, and there's an error on screen. Black back , white text: 'Press a key to reboot.' I've NEVER seen this error before on my box like this!!! So I reboot. Ok, works alright. The next day, playing MOH:AA, she locks up on me. No surprise, so I reboot. Goes thru boot processes and just as the login screen should be displayed, she resets herself. This loop continues over and over and over!!! I try a repair to the drive, no luck. Try to view drive contents. Cant' access the drive....uh oh. Dead HDD? I think not....but I am at a loss.
Perhaps there is some diagnostics tool I caould use? I dunno. I am so lost.
HELP ME!!!!

:knife:

P.S. Anyone able to reccommend a STABLE AS HECK HDD?? I've been using A pair of WD's for a while, but it's time to see about something new...

there a hd from wd.. first released for servers but now also avaiable for the end user, but still 60 month warranty! bad thing: only 36gig storage but this baby is also faster! with 10.000rpm..

only seagate ....
my PC is always on ... and I really mean always and never had a single bit datacorruption during normal operation
they are also resist any mechanical torture (one day I removed HDD to go to friend when I had it in my hands I spinned around whith my chair and the HDD in my hands crashed with the table .. I really thought now everything is over but is worked like n'anything happened)

SEAGATE disk own
very fast ... not the fastest but very fast
stable
and quit

I really like my seagate barracudas

Since it appears that no one wants to actually help you with your current problem, I'll take a stab at it.

The ONLY repair tool I've ever used that had even half a chance at repairing a hard drive is the DOS version of Norton's Disk Doctor (ndd.exe). I'm NOT referring to the Windows 32-bit version (ndd32.exe) but the DOS version (ndd.exe). There are TWO versions of the program. One (ndd32.exe) runs ONLY in Windoze. The one you want is the DOS version (ndd.exe).

Beg, borrow or steal a copy of NDD (ndd.exe). It's not a small application (a bit over 650K) so you'll probably need to put it on it's own floppy. You'll also need a DOS or Win98 boot floppy as well. Throw that in your floppy drive and reboot to a DOS prompt. Stick in the NDD floppy and run the application. It's fairly simple and intuitive to run so just let it do it's thing. It WILL tell you, by the way, if the drive is damaged beyond what it is capable or repairing and if it can't fix the drive, then you may as well throw it away. There are some computer forensics applications out there that might do a better job but they're fairly expensive.

As far as hard drive recommendations, I don't think you'll have any trouble finding someone who has both good and bad things to say about every drive manufacturer on the planet. These things are electro-MECHANICAL and they WILL wear out (eventually). Just pick a drive that comes with a good warrantee and hope for the best.

I've owned drives from virtually every manufacturer out there. I've had 2 Seagate Barracudas go bad on me but at the moment I'm very impressed with my Seagate Cheetah. I've had a dozen or so Western Digital drives and had a couple of failures with them as well as drives from Maxtor, IBM and Quantum. I'm also currently running a trio of WD Special Edition 8MB buffered 120GB drives (in RAID mode) that have proven to be extremely reliable. But, I know they will eventually fail (as will the Cheetah).

ALL hard drives eventually fail because they are ALL mechanical and those mechanisms produce friction. Friction generates heat. Heat produces wear between the mechanical parts because as metal heats up, it expands. They build tolerances (also known as "slop") into the mechanical parts but it is apparently beyond our capability as a species to produce a 100% reliable mechanical device (because we don't live in a vacuum and have this pesky thing called gravity to deal with).

I think what's important is to buy a drive with a good warrantee. Most IDE drives come with a 3-year warrantee. SCSI drives generally come with a 5-year warrantee. That does NOT mean, however, that those drives will last the full term of their warrantee. I've had drives that were only a few months old fail but since they were still under warrantee, I simply shipped them back and got free replacements. The data on those drives? If I HADN'T had back-ups, it would be gone forever.

My philosophy on hard drive back-ups --- if you CAN'T replace the data, then back it up. If the data is configured in such a way that it would be extremely time consuming to reproduce, then back it up. If you have files that frequently change or are updated on a regular basis, then back them up.

I keep a copy of my boot partition on a separate drive (as a hidden partition) using either Norton Ghost or PQMagic 8.0. That way if my boot drive (the Seagate Cheetah) ever fails or if it somehow gets corrupted, all I have to do is copy the backup over the top of the drive and I'm back in business (within minutes). If the drive fails completely, I can throw in a spare drive until I get the Cheetah replaced, copy the backup over to the new/spare drive and I'm back in business.

A little common sense goes a LONG way in this stuff and hard drives are REALLY cheap these days. Keep your boot partition fairly small and install only what is absolutely necessary onto it. A small boot partition is easy and fast to back up and restore. Keep your games, applications, movies, whatever, on a separate drive (or drives) and back up your boot partition whenever something of significance changes (i.e. a new Windoze service pack gets installed, DirectX9 updates, over-all configuration changes, etc.).

Most importantly, be AWARE that your hard drive WILL eventually fail and take measures to insure the survival of your data.

Later.

Thanks Old_Fart. I'll try your idea out. Also, thanks for the advice. I KNOW I should back up my data.... it's just getting to it. Haha, this time however, my priorities will be in order!
Thanks again. I'll let you know if I succeed

since you did not change anything on the HDD try using "easyRecovery" this is a Win32 tool so get the disk to one of your friends and use this tool to recover all data its really awesome when I lost all my data due OC try .. and I was alble to recover anything but the compressed data (NTFS) so this another chance ... you also get name with full lenght not in FILEDAT~1.DOC format