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Jedi Phoenix

It's those hard drives again. Doh.


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Oh hey again, it's me again geting my ass kicked by either by my PC or its hard drives. I've posted something of a similar matter here: http://jediphoenix.com/index.php?/topic/4184-is-my-hard-drive-dead-for-good/

 

And it seems like it's only part of a bigger problem. As I said, that hard drive is probably dead by now, because it's doing that periodical clicking sound and the PC doesn't recognize any of it. I'm still keeping it in case another PC can use it, just to save all my data from it. But it seems like the hard drive was not the origin of these paranormal faggotries. This is probably going to get very long, but I'll include every detail in case it helps specify the problem.

 

I've shortly bought off 2 more hard drives from a friend, an IDE one (40 GBytes) just to have something stable, and another 300 GB SATA one, this time a SAMSUNG instead of a HITACHI. Shortly I realised that my PC needs a power converter, as the new SATA HD doesn't support the old IDE power cable, so I was using only my new IDE and the old 80GB SATA HDs. Next, around a week later I bought the converter cable, and set it all up. Installed the OS (XP) on the IDE HD, and after failed attempts of installing it on the new SATA one (having that common problem of not being able to do it, look it up if you want), I thought it'd be alright like that; the PC will be a little bit slower, but the new RAM should probably compensate. And it worked for about a week.

 

Next, my old 80GB SATA started doing its "hang up" game. Now let me explain this. This is a problem I was having for some time now, but it would eventually make a very loud clicking sound, followed by some more silent ones, always doing the same beat sequence; it always sounds the same. That is followed by the HD hanging up, not doing anything, for about half a minute, and then it goes back to normal. These events usually fixed themselves and I moved on not caring about them. There were, however, times when it just kept repeating that rythm, like if the HD would start going back to normal, but hangs up on the first moment of trying. This would eventually lead to it not even starting up the OS, and for all I know formatting it didn't help. I thought it was because it's old and probably has a few bad sectors, but nope.jpg

 

When all 3 were lined up for use, the 80GB one did the above so baly, it was rendered unusable, so I saved off all the data to the new SATA and formatted it, which didn't help, then took it out and said I won't use it for a while. But then, my IDE started doing even if not the exact same thing, it's pretty fucking similar to it. I can sure as hell hear the loud click before it going "out", it hangs on just like the other one, but I can't hear if it's doing the same or a similar beat sequence because the HD itself is probably the most impressively silent one I've ever had. The other diference is that it's coming back to life after just a few seconds, but it's doing it constantly, which makes the system boot up in 15 minutes (25 minutes including the automatic startup of Skype), and I can't play games, listen to music or watch videos on it due to the few-seconds-long hangups that occur every 15 seconds (maybe 10). The toolbar is unusable, and explorer.exe seems to be half working only. The other big problem is, that now the new 300 GB SATA is unusable, even though both the BIOS and the OS can "see" it. When I try to open it, it treats it like a network of some sorts and says it's unreachable. Upon starting up the system, it does a disk check on it, which ends up in a system reboot without warning; rinse, repeat.

 

So, after being in this fucked up state I was using the PC only for internet access, until today I found out that if I don't use any of the SATA HDs, it starts up just fine. If there's eveen one of them hooked up, the IDE one produces the almost same symptoms of the 80GB SATA, and the others are unusable, even though the BIOS sees them (sometimes Windows can't detect them). Can anyone tell me what is going on in this PC? I'm out of deas right now. Oh, I'll list a few more things that might prove helpful identifying the problem:

 

 

-the IDE one sometimes stops working. I need to disconnect and replug te power cable in order to "wake it up"

-My BIOS was completely reset by a friend, by removing that little battery on the motherboard for a good 5 minutes

-while the IDE HD has a normal temperature, all the others are blazing hot, all the time, even if only connected to the power cable

-the old 300 GB one that is probably dead, only produces those strange clicking periods (different from the 80 GB one) if the SATA cable is connected to the PC. Otherwise, it seems like it functions all right if it's only on the power cable. Might be not dead?

-the 80 GB one on the other hand, produces its rythms even if it's only on the power cable.

-both the old 300 GB one and either the new one or the IDE one did the same "there's no BIOS i tell ya" prank. The new ones only did it once, so I'm not sure which one it was, but it seems like that symptom wasn't the old 300GB one's fault either. The exact message I get when it doesn't start up goes like this: "Hardware Initiate Failed. " and one paragraph lower: "The Bios does not be installed" Yes, it says exactly that, with the BIOS written like that too. For more info on this see my previous thread, linked up there.

 

can't think of any other thing possibly important. Any help is greatly appreciated.

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-My BIOS was completely reset by a friend, by removing that little battery on the motherboard for a good 5 minutes

-The exact message I get when it doesn't start up goes like this: "Hardware Initiate Failed. " and one paragraph lower: "The Bios does not be installed" Yes, it says exactly that, with the BIOS written like that too.

Honestly, this tells me there's something with the mobo itself. HDDs and the like can't effect the BIOS at all. Perhaps try replacing the battery? CMOS batteries are just a normal thing you can take to whatever local shop you have that happens to carry a metric ton of batteries and casually replace. Usually pretty cheap too.

 

 

while the IDE HD has a normal temperature, all the others are blazing hot, all the time, even if only connected to the power cable

And this makes me think PSU. Maybe try taking them to the friend you bought spare drives off of and test them using his power supply? Hell, may as well try to boot into the OS with them while you're at it.

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Honestly, this tells me there's something with the mobo itself. HDDs and the like can't effect the BIOS at all. Perhaps try replacing the battery? CMOS batteries are just a normal thing you can take to whatever local shop you have that happens to carry a metric ton of batteries and casually replace. Usually pretty cheap too.

 

 

 

And this makes me think PSU. Maybe try taking them to the friend you bought spare drives off of and test them using his power supply? Hell, may as well try to boot into the OS with them while you're at it.

 

The CMOS battery might not be a problem, as the error message you quoted is fair(i)ly frequent, and it's appearing for way too many reasons, none of which has anything to actually do with BIOS as far as I know.

 

The power box may need a change though, it's only 350 kW, supplying a 2600+ shitty CPU, a DVD burner, floppy drive (needed for XP installation on SATA, though it's powered through one of those way old audio cables that were needed for CD burners in some PC's of the stone age, going straight to a random place on the motherboard), and now the 3 hard drives, but 2 would be enough I'd say. Are these a bit too much for it? Also, my graphic card is a Nvidia GeForce 6600.

 

A huge update I have to share too. It seems that the clicking sound ddn't actually came from the IDE HD, but my new 300 GB one. After using killdisk, I found out what restarted and slowed down my system, and it's a bunch of found.chk files that are un-openable. I'm not sure if it has to do anything with my 80 GB SATA, but uncanny symptoms are uncanny.

 

Also, now the power converter for SATA doesn't seem to work properly. It junctions one IDE power outlet into 2 SATA ones, out of which only one seems to work now at a time. Didn't used to be all like this first.

 

Anyway, thanks for the help so far, trying to save my data with a bootdisk if possible now, and I'll see after formatting the 300 GB one if it works or not. Will post the results.

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The CMOS battery might not be a problem, as the error message you quoted is fair(i)ly frequent, and it's appearing for way too many reasons, none of which has anything to actually do with BIOS as far as I know.

 

The power box may need a change though, it's only 350 kW, supplying a 2600+ shitty CPU, a DVD burner, floppy drive (needed for XP installation on SATA, though it's powered through one of those way old audio cables that were needed for CD burners in some PC's of the stone age, going straight to a random place on the motherboard), and now the 3 hard drives, but 2 would be enough I'd say. Are these a bit too much for it? Also, my graphic card is a Nvidia GeForce 6600.

 

I'm not sure about where you live, but here a typical CMOS battery is like $2. So its super cheap to replace and not a huge loss regardless if it changes anything or not (just be sure to keep the old one in case). Ultimately, it's up to you though.

 

As far as the power supply goes: Your GPU alone is recommended as having a minimum of 350W. Tack on that a CPU minimum is somewhere around ~60W, so you have to assume you're going well over what your power supply can handle with those two components alone. Quality power supplies have a fail safe and just shut down when they're overloaded. However, being that it's a 350W PSU I have to assume that it was just a cheap after thought, and thus not of a high quality standard. Without that fail safe, an overloaded PSU can do any number of things. But all of which are extremely bad for every other piece of hardware in the computer.

 

The biggest problem to worry about with overloaded power supplies (when they don't just catch fire) is that they cease to do the job they were designed to do effectively. PSU's convert AC power currents (wall outlet) into DC, which is what your hardware uses. The more bogged down it is, the more AC voltages it lets bleed through unconverted. As power = heat and all of your hard drives are so hot, with even just being plugged into the power alone, this might be what is happening in your case. Which means far more than just your HDD's can be and probably are effected by it. With any luck, there isn't any lasting, permanent damage. But there's not much guarantee.

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I'll see if the shop across my office has a CMOS battery and for how much, and I'll see about that GPU too then. However, now I'm facing another problem, 'cause one comes after another like all the time.

 

I have important data on my 300GB SATA that I need to place on my 80GB one. It's somewhat under 60 GBs allover. Now, I have tried many things to get this to work, and I simply can't copy it over my other hard drives. The problem's the following: There are 4 "foundchk" folders that contain unreadable files (Scandisk says "File record segment unreadable", roughly translated back to english), and as soon as anything tries to even look at it, they will cause the HD to "hang" in various ways. This was what caused my PC run like shit as mentioned above in the first post. There are however 2 other folders separate from those (thank God!), but every time I try to copy them, it fails.

 

The Windows XP installer has this "repair system" function, which I only used to rebuild some lost NTLDRs back in the day, but I remembered it had some copy functions as well. Now it turns out, it only wants to copy system files and to very specific folders. It also says it's able to copy anything from the root directory, but that ain't much help for me

 

A program called Active NTFS Reader can read all disks for which I was glad, but then it just has to scan the devices before copying, so it eventually finds those evil files and hang up like, forever. I'm not kidding, I watched Rocky IV and killed off like 20 elderly in GTA IV and it didn't move a fucking inch,

 

Then, there's DOS, in which I tried but failed for a lot of reasons. Will look up some specific commands to use there.

 

Can anyone suggest a bootable diskette (or CD) creator which I could use to restore those 2 folders? If you know any programs like that, please tell me, I'm willing to try them.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Bumpity-bump here.

 

Finally I got some time to try Ubuntu and DOS to copy those files but there are some problems in my way. The link describes a lot to work with, but the Ubuntu it links to with the Download button is completely different, so I can't follow its instructions. Still, I burned it to a DVD and fired it up with try mode to try and copy shit, and gotta say it took the bad hard drive a little bit better than my XP. It started to analyze it but it only showed me foundchk, foundchk1 and foundchk2 folders, all of which I deleted knowing they might be the ones wreaking havoc. It didn't recognize any other folders or files, unlike on the other hard drives though, so I wasn't able to copy anything from what I wanted. Once I deleted those folders though, the clicking noise stopped, so I restarted with Windows to see if it was fixed. Well, Checkdisk tells me there's 2 more foundchk folders there which are unreadable (3 and 4), and it's back doing the same shit it's used to.

 

I also tried DOS and its xcopy command, but the problem was that it didn't see my folders at all. So i tried the CHDIR or CD command to "travel" to my damaged hard drive, which didn't work. Then I tried to open a folder on a functional HD which didn't work. Then I remembered that DOS gives a completely different label to each my hard drives that Windows, so I tried basically the first half of english ABC as hard drives, and it didn't recognize any of it. First I thought this was because they are SATA (forgetting that my boot diskette contains a SATA support for DOS), but then why the hell can't it see my IDE hard drive at all? I'm definitely doing this the wrong way, or DOS is possessed by the unholy Hobfuck, a demon set to destroy some users' sanity.

 

I also tried to copy the folders using the command line found in XP, which says tat there is not an H:\ drive (the label it gave for the damaged HD), despite the My Computer folder and Total Commander telling me otherwise. Xcopy says the same thing there, concluding that 0 files were copied. I also tried Bad Copy which worked for damaged files on discs, but as soon as I try to open H:\ it hangs on for a few minutes before becoming operable, and goes back to the drive selection screen.

 

CONCLUSION,

 

It seems like both Ubuntu and Windows can't read any "further" than those damaged foundchk folders. That's weird, 'cause alphabetically the folders I'm looking for, at least one of them should be available (called "evvoltaeff"). Ubuntu showed the other foundchk folders and let me delete them, but it said that otherwise the drive is empty. Yet when I looked at its properties, it said that there's 70 GB in use (circa the amount that I need to copy from there). I'm not sure any more what my options are here, but it might be that I wasn't using DOS the right way, and some antivirus could help, so here's what I'm asking:

 

-a complete guide and a downloadable diskette for DOS with SATA support (not sure if mine works actually...)

-an antivirus that does a pre-startup scan, using the same screen as checkdisk on XP. I remember one doing this, either AVG or AVAST, or maybe Norton? NOt sure, that's why I'm asking. The reason I ask for this is because checkdisk clearly runs through the files I need before startup, and the only bugs it finds are the foundchk files. It is so far the only thing that could access the rest of the hard drive, but is impossible to copy anything manually. And there's the fact that this whole misery might be caused by a trojan that a friend had a few months back, so the antivir I'm asking for might be the only thing able to fix this hard drive without formatting.

-basically anything else that I could use to backup specific folders with, where the program doesn't do a full scan of the drive itself before trying to "look at it"; it can't anyways and it renders the hard drive completely useless sometimes.

-just a reminder, formatting would probably fix this. But I ain't doing it until I got my shit from the drive. I already lost some keys to products I purchased, passwords for mentioned products and lots of important data, out of which I was only able to recover my Humble Bundle keys and that one Indie Royale key I bought last year. Other things I lost include a full list of current and potential clients for my work (remember, I'm an insurance agent) and basically all my cfgs for JA, so all those profiles I was using are lost now, plus all the few signatures and modded skins I made. These were all on the other hard drive that is 99% dead, and only some other important things could I save on the other drive, which is lost on this one, and it seems I should be able to recover them. So in short, I'm not giving them up and formatting my drive.

 

If anyone can help me with anything, I'd be the most grateful guy here on the internet.

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Okay, huge update here

 

I actually managed to backup those files after trying Ubuntu the 2nd time. This time they were just there, visible and operable all of a sudden. Took a good 4 hours or so to copy them over, but dang, at least it's all done. I formatted the drive and now the clicking is all gone. Happily ever after.

 

Or is it? Oh of fucking course it's not. Now my drive is there, seen by BIOS and the VIA RAID tool, but not showing up in Windows at all. Anyone has an idea why? I used KILLDISK to format it by the way, as ironic as it is since it seems like it really killed it...

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  • 2 weeks later...

yeah, sorta... the other one that I mentioned in the other topic is dead for good. The new one however... turned out it was a power cable. I bought it brand new and it lasted exactly a weekend and one day. The yellow cable "ripped itself" or whatever the donkeytesticle happened there. Well, at least I was able to save my data from it. Right now, the 80 GB one is doing some weird shit (like freezing my computer every 3 seconds by overloading my cpu after accessing some content from it), but only under this Windows I'm using, so it's a software problem.

 

Anyway, thanks for the helps, especially for Ubuntu. It saved Windows' ass, and not for the last time I presume.

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