Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Arve Alsvik
The procedure I suggest is absolutely a last resort thing to do.
I've would have tried to replace the hard drives controller-card. The card sitting on top of the disk. Usually it can be removed. And most likely malfunctioning controller card is the reason for the hard drive crash. But it have to be replaced with another card from the same type of hard disk. In a corporate environment this would be easy, but alas, it may be more difficult in a home situation.
Anyway: This is my only suggestion.
Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: John_A_Cook
- The first thing I would do is pull in a BIOS upgrade from the PC manufacturer and flash the system.
- You said that the user got into the Setup and changed the settings. If an upgrade for the BIOS does not find the drive and auto detect the it, then get out the tools and open the machine up to have a look at it's guts.
- Remove the HDD and get the info off of it and manually enter it into the settings.
Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: TorA.Rysstad
The most important thing to do in this situation is to protect the data on the drive. And in my experience; the more one try to "look" for data on the disk, the more it might get destroyed.
Try to listen to the hard drive. Are there any weird sounds emitting from it? I have two "sound categories." The first is identified by sort of "buzzing" sound or perhaps a loud "ploink" sound. The second category: no sound at all, or the drive seems to running at full speed, even if the PC is "frozen." The first might indicate a physical damage. That might be hard to solve, but that does not imply that everything is lost. I often find almost everything on the disk like this:
- Take the damaged hard drive out of the client's PC.
- Take particular care not to bump the drive. There is a chance that the heads are not parked properly. You don't need more damage to the disk than there already are!
- Put the damaged disk in another PC.
Usually with modern disks you can auto-sense the needed specs (Heads, Cylinders, etc.), but sometimes you'll need to type this manually. And of some reason the hard drive manufactures has not considered it important enough to print this information on the label. This has puzzled me more than one time... But you can find all you need on the Internet. The Compaq that was mentioned was (I think) originally equipped with a Seagate disk. Their disk Support can be found on
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/discsupt.shtml
Remember that you will probably have to change the jumper setting. MAKE SURE THE DAMAGED DISK IS SET TO BE SLAVE!!
Copy the needed files from the damaged disk
Try to copy the files you need from the damaged disk. DO NOT try to run Scandisk or Norton Disk Doctor etc!! These programs might make things worse! Do every thing to get the files you need first! Afterwards you might consider attempts to revive the disk. Then Scandisk will be very helpful. But remember, if the disk has crashed once, then you should not trust the disk.
If you cannot find anything on the disk, then I have found that Norton Utilities is amazingly effective. But there are alternatives available at http://hotfiles.zdnet.com/
Revive is a simple small program. Try it! I've tried it a couple of times, and it really works!! BTW: The Prolinea should not be thrown away just yet! If there is a network card in it, then it can be used as a intranet server. Install Linux and Apache Web server on it, maybe even FrontPage extensions, and voila, you'll have a splendid intranet server, or a test bench for testing Web-ideas! Just remember that:
- A computer this old might not be able to support very large disks (> 1.2 GB)
- Update the BIOS. The Prolinea has Flashable BIOS. So updating the BIOS is very simple. Take a look here:
http://www.compaq.com/support/files/desktops/us/10_22.html
Install Linux without graphical interface. The 486 processor will not offer the power needed to run KDE or GNOME in a satisfying way. You will also save allot of disk space. If you can find a old 540Mb disk then that can be more than enough!
If you install NT 3.51 Server, then this computer might be used as a separate printer server. It should be able to serve approx. 30-40 people without any trouble. But you should have 32_MB RAM and approx. 500-MB free space if the users are printing large files, like PowerPoint presentations, etc.
