Probably lost a hard drive, or is it the humidity

N

Neilster

Guest
Well, my trusty ole desktop didn't boot up tonight. Windows (98) was frozen so I did a three finger salute. It responded with "A data error while reading the FAT on drive C" message.... Doh!!!

It's been pretty humid in the house for about a week (80%+) but the AC hasn't been on that much as the temperature has been ok inside. I am hoping that it may be related to the humidity...."Dreamer...."

I disconnected it and moved it downstairs where it's cooler and less humid that the upstairs office (60%+). I'll leave it for a day or two and see what happens.

I've routinely backed up almost all the data on another hard drive for just such an occasion. I think Drive D is ok.

In the meantime, I have my trusty Toshiba PII with W95 for emergency purposes...

Any thoughts other than "it's probaby toast"...
 
RE: Probably lost a hard drive, or is it the humidity

I'd suggest fdisk /mbr - it's safe and has resolved a lot of FAT problems for me in the past, and should not affect your data.
[link:support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;69013|FDISK /MBR info]

John
http://mark8.org/users/johnaec/Mark_VIII_s.jpg
'97 Mark VIII LSC
'96 T-Bird 4.6L
 
RE: Probably lost a hard drive, or is it the humidity

Thanks John for the advice and the link. I'll give it a shot probably tomorrow and let you know how it went. I assume the command is at the DOS prompt... At least the system is still available to that extent. It gave me a " Searching for boot record in IDE-0. Boot Failure" message, which is consistent with your input...
 
RE: Probably lost a hard drive, or is it the humidity

It is run from a DOS prompt. The FDISK program is usually in the \Command folder of Windows 98, but if inaccessible, you may have to use a boot disk floppy with the fdisk program copied to it.

John
http://mark8.org/users/johnaec/Mark_VIII_s.jpg
'97 Mark VIII LSC
'96 T-Bird 4.6L
 
RE: Probably lost a hard drive, or is it the humidity

Turned out to be a bad hard drive after all. The computer mechanic reported that it would intermittently start throwing bad sectors (that's me paraphrasing) just sitting there. So much for Maxstor drives. It was a 40 Gig model, new in Dec. 2001.

We're going to put in a Western Digital with a 3 year warranty and see if we can "ghost" over some of the directories. At least the majority of my data is on a separate drive (another Western Digital).

The bad news is I'll have to reload all my app's and their respective patches. Oh well, it could have been worse. At least I have my trusted notebook for emergency purposes and I have licensed copies of my applications.

Thanks for the feedback...
 
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