Disk Boot Failure (1 Viewer)

[Lord Ac]

Ok, my brother's comp. just died. He said that yesterday he got a "Doctor Watson Post Mortem Debugger" error message and IE was forced to close down.

Today, when booting he gets a "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" ....

I looked around BIOS and it is not detecting the hard disk (even with auto detect). I boot from cd and it tells me there is no hard disk.

WTF HAPPENED TO MY HARD DISK??? It was working fine for 2 years or whatever ... then gone.

Will I be able to recover data on the disk?

Thanks,
Ac

 

[+Po1ntDeXt3r+]

restoring wise
there is a possibility tat u can mount it as a slave HDD on another computer to recover stuff... otherwise usually there is a 5 yr warranty which they will replace it for u.. but they dun cover the data.. and u get a new blank one

hmmm mabbe ure motherboard is fried?
put the HDD on another computer?

 

[MedNez]

If you can - get someone who knows what they're doing to set your hard drive up as a slave drive on their machine, to get the data off. The boot sector or windows installation might've been corrupted beyond repair, but you might have a small chance of getting things off it.

If however it's a mechanical failure, then no, you won't be able to recover data.

 

[Lord Ac]

ok, thanks guys ... but get this: I open up the case and look around. Quite dusty. I vucuum it up, press in all the cables to make sure they are still in or whaever ...

I plug everything back in and it works! Like nothing ever happended?????

Is it possible for an IDE cable to come loose or something?

Weird as hell.

Ac

 

[ogmzergrush]

Yes, that's a possibility. The dust could also cause heating issues meaning that the drive failed to respond, etc. Part of proper computer maintenance should involve regularly cleaning dust from the internals to keep things running smoothly.

 

[fatmuscle]

do as MedNez suggested. ASAP.

It may not be the HDD at all.

btw, there's no other errors?
If you have another HDD, try loading htat up.

 

[AntiHyper]

Most modern hard disks has a S.M.A.R.T. capability or "Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology".

If you haven't checked this system regularly, it should show your hard drive's performance, fitness and a handfull of other attributes such as read error rate and temperature. SMART would monitor the worst-case scenario that had physically happened (EG. the highest temperature ever) and store it for some diagnostic program to read.

I use SpeedFan, which not only monitor your system's temps, fan speed & voltages but also calculate the fitness of your hard disk as well as showing the SMART data. It seemed though that your disk just died.