I know you guys are probably tired of PC related questions here and im already in the process of signing up at a couple of web tech forums for future inquiries but I figure Id ask here 1st anyway.

My moms comp crashed a few days ago. Its an HP Pavillion running Windows 7 64-bit. Before I wipe it clean and re install the OS I removed the hard drive so I could grab all her files. I bought one of these . Its a Universal hard drive adapter and reads IDE and SATA. Seems simple enough.

I connect it to my comp and it does the usual letter assigning so her main hd comes up as drive J on my laptop. Now its telling me I need to format it before I can use it Now that just completely defeats the purpose now doesnt it? I try to adjust the permissions but it wont let me Not sure what else to try. Im sure theres a simple answer to this but right now im coming up empty. Any suggestions?

 

did you change the pin/jumper from Master to Slave? (no joke intended) That might be one of the issues causing the problem.

 

If that doesn't work, then its possible the drive itself is bad and the computer you're hooking it up to can't read the data.

When you say "crashed" whats happening with the PC? Are you still able to boot to Windows?

 

Is that possible on a laptop drive? I thought you only do that with desktop hardrives. Sorry for the noob questions im still learning. I thought it was simple plug and play with the drive adapter. My laptop is currently running and I cant still view my C drive as the main one

 

No it wont boot the OS. After running for about 25min or so it will give me a diagnostic screen

 

What does the diagnostic screen say?

 

Trying to remember off the top of my head.....What I do know for certain is it gave me the option of diagnosing the system for problems (which I did) and putting the comp back to factory, which erases everything on the hd. So I thought It would be easier to take it out and read it as an external drive on my laptop first...

 

Your drive is fucked! That's why it's asking you to format it. It's not the adapter or windows fault. When you insert a drive and it asks to be formatted even though you know the drive is formatted that means there's a serious issue with the drive.

At this point you can try running a program like spinrite 6 and see what that does or run getdatabackNTFS

I'm going to assume that since her OS is Windows 7 that her drive will be a SATA drive. However if it is IDE make sure you didn't connect it upside down. nowadays this shouldn't be an issue but I've had it happen to me where I connected an IDE drive upside down (Very old 40-pin ribbon cable) and it believe it popped up the same message telling me to format. But that's probably not your issue, your drive is fucked and that's why it isn't booting to begin with.

OH BTW DO NOT format the drive when it's asking you to, leave it alone

 

I have had great luck with getdataback. Even on a hard drive that was formatted.

 

Dammit! Ok thank you for the info. Now what should I do? Wouldnt make much sense to stick the drive back in there. The comp is fairly new. Should I just shop for another HD?

Im gonna try this next. Thanks!

 

If you want a free copy of getdataback NTFS you can download Hirens' Boot CD and run that, it's on there. Apparently it's not on the latest version 11 of hiren's but it's on 10.6 and lower.

 

Almost all PCs and Macs have a 1yr parts warranty so if it's under warranty then get the drive replaced but they won't recover that data.

IDK you may've voided your warranty by taking the drive out already....

 

File system is corrupted. Files are probably fine.

If it's important, find a place that can do basic data recovery.

If not, format it and move on with life.

 

Its not under warranty anyway. I'll just see if I can get another one for cheap. Im just mad it screwed up this fast. This is going to take longer than I thought now. Plus I'll have to re install 7

 

I thought it was a bad idea to format if I do that will it work when place it back inside her comp?

 

Corrupted file system is what I figured. Now that could be caused by a bad block or sector or something at the beginning of the drive right? So if he ran a program like SpinRite6 it might be able to fix it and recover that bad block so he can copy his data back, right?

Stogie, I've mentioned this program to you before but I'll show it to you again.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

 

If you don't care about the data, you are going to have to do SOMETHING to it so that your mom's machine can see the drive. What this means is that, once you surrender hope for the current files on there, you will need to attache it to her computer, format it, and then reinstall the OS (if it's the OS drive). If it's just a data drive, format it and stick it back in...

 

Never tried spinrite, but the basics are the same and it should work.

Since there were no warning about bad sectors, I don't think there is physical damage to the drive, but it may have had a voltage interruption during an important write operation that corrupted the file system. If a sector or block of sectors are corrupted, chkdsk or similar programs will correct it or mark it as bad.

If you can see the drive in any interface, see if the size of $Bad on the root is greater than default.

 

Huh?

 

Im going to try getdataback to recover the files. It is the OS drive. Hopefully I this works and I wont have to buy a new hd.

 

sorry I didn't get a chance to answer your question, I had to step away for a while. Yep Stunna pretty much summed it up; which is what I was afraid of. If its not even letting you in windows and another PC can't recognize the drive, then its more than likely your HD. I've had flash drives do the exact same thing.

Let us know how getdataback works. (I've never heard of that before, but I'll check it out since yall mentioned it.

No matter what happens, in the future, I think it would be a good idea to look into some backup software for your mom. Had the stuff been backed up, you would have saved a lot of time tonight. I use Acronis BTW

 

The physical drive is fine. It's the file system on it that is screwed up.

Does the hdd spin? Does it click a lot as it spins? If it spins and does not click a lot, it's fine.

 

Trust me, lesson learned. Im buying her an external hd this week. I tried getdataback but it couldnt find anything. System must be really screwed up I guess I have no choice now but to format and reinstall.

It spins, no clicking at all.

 

I returned the hard drive inside the laptop and now when I try to reformat it gives me a "runtime error" message. It shut itself down before I could continue reading. Should I just remove it again and let my laptop format it externally?

 

Yeah, that's what I've always done when I want to restore a system from scratch.

 

"Windows was unable to complete the format" looks like its time for a new hd

 

From the command line, try Format /u

 

so my moms winXP machine got a BSOD and when i rebooted it. i got this.

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM"
It then says, input original windows xp CD, and click "r" to repair.

when i goto repair with a winXP CD, it just brings me to the console. wtf im supposed to do there.

when i put it into my win7 machine, it recognizes, but said access denied. so i took ownership of it in win7 and right now its setting the security info for every individual file

so if i copy all the data to an extra hard drive. its not possible to put that HD back into the machine and boot off it right?

 

or if i upgrade it to win7 would that fix it too? and keep all the data intact?

 

That's the repair console. You need to go back a step and select the setup XP option, then repair:

Check out this DIY for auto repair:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

A guy made another version and put all the missing stuff back, its called Hiren's Boot CD 11 Restored or something like that

 

Not good, that's one of the main registry files. You could try to replace the file with the backup then boot into windows and run system restore to see if you can restore to a point prior to the error.

There's a knowledge base article on replacing the SYSTEM file with the backup. Let me find it.

If that doesn't work, a reload is in your future.


Edit: here it is but you only need restore the one file. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

 

i had the exact same problem a month ago.

my laptop's hard drive crashed after BSODs. i took the HD out of the laptop and connected it to my old laptop with a similar universal adaptor. once i plugged it into my old laptop, i got the same error message saying i need to format the drive.

basically, after weeks of research and experimenting, i came across a program called testdisk at cgsecurity.org.

after playing with it a few times, i saw that my files are still there (it's a DOS-like tool). i was eventually able to copy all of my files into a 1TB external HD i bought. whew!

i don't remember the steps i took, and it was mostly by chance. good luck!

 

^ looks interesting...

 

the steps on the website were a bit of a pain in the arse.

i had to play around with it a few times.

i even bought a program called data partition recovery frome easus, a taiwanese company. i eventually got a refund because i ended up using the other program (testdisk) to recover my files.

 

so i tried this.
when i try to make the backup of the SYSTEM file, it says "unable to copy:

then when i try to copy the replacement one it says "file not found"

this shit is fucked.
ive backed everything up, so i think i should be ok to just do a fresh install...

my mom just really wanted her pictures and videos saved. which i should have it all.
if anything ill just use a spare 100gb HD i have lying around and use that for the fresh install.

 

Does anyone know what in windows update would cause the computer to take forever to fully boot. (as in all programs loaded and everything good to go)

It's really slow. And when it starts up MSE is disabled. And then turns on. Then the firewall turns off and then turns back on. And overall the system is very very laggy.

I used the system update earlier (the one that goes thru Internet explorer) and now it's slow as balls.

Also after the update for some reason it put a very old graphics driver forcing my display down to 640x480 and 4bit color :thumbsdow

Stupid XP...

 

^^ is this your moms pc? I can't help but wonder if the HD is dying and thats what corrupted the registry. Might want to run an HD diagnostic. If that checks out, how many times have you rebooted? I know if you installed .NET 3.5, it has an optimizer that will run afterwards and can bog down a system for a little bit. Also, it could be the windows update service itself, I've seen it be very resource intense at startup in some cases. you can test that by disabling the service temporarily and rebooting. Start > Run > services.msc

The service name is "automatic updates"

 

i installed windows on a newer 200GB HD.

 

Ahh, ok. Something else to check is right after bootup, start the task manager and order the list by CPU and see if there's something taking up alot of cycles.