We based one of our most popular pop quiz challenges on a situation every tech support person has faced or will face at least once: a failed hard drive. In that particular case, a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 user was getting errors like "disk 0 error" and "invalid drive specification." Here were the other facts in the case:
- The data wasn't backed up.
- The problem came out of nowhere.
- The user had accessed Setup and tried to manually enter the settings for the drive type when "Auto"
didn't work.
- There was no startup disk made by this machine.
Reviving a drive like that one even if only long enough to copy its data before you throw the drive in the garbage is a tough challenge. When we have researched how other people would troubleshoot a situation like this one, we received over 200 solutions, and we decided to publish this collection of over 200 ways to revive a hard drive.
In editing this document, we tried as much as possible to preserve the voices of the people who submitted these solutions. Of course, we can't promise that any of these tips will work in every setting. But we thought you'd enjoy reading what your fellow IT professionals had to say on this subject. Enjoy!
