This is getting ridiculous!!
About 5 weeks ago my WinXP Boot drive got a HDD SMART Fail Error and would only boot up to Windows Start screen (which was custom so I knew was seeing something on HD even tho if put as a slave orused a bootable floppy it said was unformatted!
After buying a new WD 160G IDE HD, reinstalling XP hooked up bad HD as slave (XP sees it but as an empty unformatted HD) and then installing TestDisk prog on it I could see the Bad HD and I recovered ~50G of data off it (MP3's I ripped off my CD collection mostly, but also my bookmarks, addressbook and shortcuts to 5 HD's of programs (many old progs that needed custom shortcut setups))! Yeah!
~11days later my PC won't boot again! Cursor was locking up frequently for 30 sec to 1 min at a time so I painfully (veeerryy slooooooooowly) told it to reboot PC but when came back on it gets thru the Windows load screen with the moving bar but after that it sits there with a black screen and then after 15 minutes it displays the Windows Starting screen but gets no further. So is a little diff from last time with old bad HD as that did't take 15 min to go to Win Start scr, was normal immediate but would then immediately reboot pc on own. With this new HD it just stays at the WinXP Start screen forever ;+((
I used my WinXP CD to run Windows Recovery Console, 1st time it couldn't load Win Recovery Console, said
"File\i386\biosinfo.inf could not be loaded" Error #4096
So I rebooted, went into Bios and resaved it
I rebooted off my WinXP CD and it went into Recovery Console this time
BUT it says I have a non-standard Main Boot Record (which I assume means it got corrupted somehow? and LOTS of warnings if I tell it to try to fix it I might lose my partitions and any data on them! Since I have that 50G+ of MP3s and other data on this new HD I'm leery of losing it and it taking me ~ 1-2 weeks again to recover it off of the old bad HD AGAIN! and another week or 2 to get PC up & running again (setting up networks, email, reinstalling main progs that put stuff in Registry or Win dir so wouldn't run, ...)
But I don't want to have to buy ANOTHER HD so I can recover ~20G MORE data I xferred to it from other HDs as that isn't backed up either (as I'd need a Terabyte backup HD and a prog to back up every file on 5 HDs and I can't afford at this time :+(
So I guess I'm gonna haveta try to find a way to put this TestDisk prog onto a bootable WinXP CD (if there is such an animal?). Or maybe onto a bootable Linux CD, vaguely think I might have to run into one of them on the net (but problem is I think it was in ".iso" format and I'd have to try to get it and burn it here at work (my only access to net for now). Not sure if I have a prog at work that can burn iso's (I think Nero can but is on dead pc's new bad HD;+( At work I think my company only has some flavor of Easy CD Creator I believe (not sure as I've only used it once in like 3 years).
I'm now afraid I've have either a virus somewhere trashing my MBR's that AVG isn't catching or a PS that's damaging HD's?
Any ideas?
Regards,
manic49er
About 5 weeks ago my WinXP Boot drive got a HDD SMART Fail Error and would only boot up to Windows Start screen (which was custom so I knew was seeing something on HD even tho if put as a slave orused a bootable floppy it said was unformatted!
After buying a new WD 160G IDE HD, reinstalling XP hooked up bad HD as slave (XP sees it but as an empty unformatted HD) and then installing TestDisk prog on it I could see the Bad HD and I recovered ~50G of data off it (MP3's I ripped off my CD collection mostly, but also my bookmarks, addressbook and shortcuts to 5 HD's of programs (many old progs that needed custom shortcut setups))! Yeah!
~11days later my PC won't boot again! Cursor was locking up frequently for 30 sec to 1 min at a time so I painfully (veeerryy slooooooooowly) told it to reboot PC but when came back on it gets thru the Windows load screen with the moving bar but after that it sits there with a black screen and then after 15 minutes it displays the Windows Starting screen but gets no further. So is a little diff from last time with old bad HD as that did't take 15 min to go to Win Start scr, was normal immediate but would then immediately reboot pc on own. With this new HD it just stays at the WinXP Start screen forever ;+((
I used my WinXP CD to run Windows Recovery Console, 1st time it couldn't load Win Recovery Console, said
"File\i386\biosinfo.inf could not be loaded" Error #4096
So I rebooted, went into Bios and resaved it
I rebooted off my WinXP CD and it went into Recovery Console this time
BUT it says I have a non-standard Main Boot Record (which I assume means it got corrupted somehow? and LOTS of warnings if I tell it to try to fix it I might lose my partitions and any data on them! Since I have that 50G+ of MP3s and other data on this new HD I'm leery of losing it and it taking me ~ 1-2 weeks again to recover it off of the old bad HD AGAIN! and another week or 2 to get PC up & running again (setting up networks, email, reinstalling main progs that put stuff in Registry or Win dir so wouldn't run, ...)
But I don't want to have to buy ANOTHER HD so I can recover ~20G MORE data I xferred to it from other HDs as that isn't backed up either (as I'd need a Terabyte backup HD and a prog to back up every file on 5 HDs and I can't afford at this time :+(
So I guess I'm gonna haveta try to find a way to put this TestDisk prog onto a bootable WinXP CD (if there is such an animal?). Or maybe onto a bootable Linux CD, vaguely think I might have to run into one of them on the net (but problem is I think it was in ".iso" format and I'd have to try to get it and burn it here at work (my only access to net for now). Not sure if I have a prog at work that can burn iso's (I think Nero can but is on dead pc's new bad HD;+( At work I think my company only has some flavor of Easy CD Creator I believe (not sure as I've only used it once in like 3 years).
I'm now afraid I've have either a virus somewhere trashing my MBR's that AVG isn't catching or a PS that's damaging HD's?
Any ideas?
Regards,
manic49er
