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Computer Troubles

targobelle

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So I am on the good computer tonight and I wander away but when I come back I see the blue screen of death..... It couldn't find something. So I decide to reboot, and I keep getting a None System Disk error. What?

I reboot and still get it

I decide to go into the bios and see what the deal is and discover that for some reason it's not detecting my hard drive. What the hard drive isn't even a year old but there is no hard drive. Could that be a wire configuration?

Any idea what I should do in order to trouble shoot it?
 

rivercrow

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This may seem funky, but try reseating all the connecting wires to the HD.
 

targobelle

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I hope not it has ALL my pictures on it and it's not backed up

damn I so hope not
 

Xander

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I hope not it has ALL my pictures on it and it's not backed up

damn I so hope not
If it is then get yourself a hard drive caddy and a copy of partition magic. That way you can plug it into the new computer and hopefully extract the information.

Oh yeah, put your ear to it and see if you can hear it "spin up" like a CD drive does.
 

Xander

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Oh yeah. Have you had an error appear on the BIOS screen reading "checksum error" ? Either that or has anyone pissed about with your BIOS?

If so it may well be that your hard drive is plugged into a RAID port and someone has turned RAID on.

(Just a passing thought)
 

Totenkindly

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This may seem funky, but try reseating all the connecting wires to the HD.

Yes, sometimes that does work.

Did you actually run the auto-detect again in BIOS?

Do you know your specs for the hard drive? Can you manually input the specs and see if that does it? The reseating is the first step.

It is definitely not a good sign, but there are probably some other steps to take. (I usually do not recall all of them until I have a problem, then have to research the issue online.)
 

rivercrow

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If the sucker spins, it can prolly have the data recovered. Xander's suggestion of an external drive caddy isn't a bad idea. See if someone has one.

You can also talk to a data recovery service. That might cost--locally, a company does that for $800+. I'd help, since I used to do that as part of my job role, but you're not around here.
 

targobelle

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I did pull out and plug back in all the connections and what do you know it's working
 

rivercrow

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I did pull out and plug back in all the connections and what do you know it's working

:nice:
Now, see.... If you want to impress all your geek friends, tell them your machine had "thermal creep."
 

Langrenus

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...and if you want to avoid the panic in the future, go backup all of your valuable stuff, now...

</end hypocrisy>
 

targobelle

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yeah I will get to it... I think we're gonna buy and external hard drive... I wanted a separate one for all my pictures
 

Zergling

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Now, see.... If you want to impress all your geek friends, tell them your machine had "thermal creep."

Is that the fancy word for when the chips heat up and get out of position? (My dad described that as happening to a computer I had before.)
 

rivercrow

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Is that the fancy word for when the chips heat up and get out of position? (My dad described that as happening to a computer I had before.)

Yup.

It's actually the heat-up/cool-down cycle repeated that does it.
 

rivercrow

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No, not overheating.

All those connectors are made of metal. When the machine is on and electricity runs thru them, they heat up and they get a little bigger--remember, heat causes things to expand. When the machine is turned off, the metal cools and contracts. These changes will be tiny, but after a while they add up. Eventually, the metal connectors don't have a close enough fit, the electricity won't flow, and your machine can't find the drive.

That's thermal creep. It's Newtonian physics. :)
 

Xander

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Google itself is the best guide on hard drives. They use civilian off the shelf hard drives to store a lot of their information. I believe they released a survey a while back on how well the drives survived and (as the learned Lovecraftian Kitty pointed out) most failed due to being switched on and off. Overheating, overuse... pretty much all crap. If it don't fail in the first three months (or something like that) chances are it won't fail for several years.

Targo,
Get yourself a DVD writer if you want to be sure. It's then protected against water damage, power spikes and all kinds of nasty act's of sod's law.
 

rivercrow

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Get yourself a DVD writer if you want to be sure. It's then protected against water damage, power spikes and all kinds of nasty act's of sod's law.

Ok, geekish religious war time. :nerd:

Commercially burnt CDs and DVDs have a longer life than the home-consumer equivalents. An article I read recently dropped the life expectancy of CDs from 50 to 10-20 years.

We have a lot of competing versions of DVD right now. Will one win out and betamax the rest? Back in the mid-90s, we had problems with some CD players being unable to read discs from some CD burners.

And then you have the problem of software obsolescence, one of the best reasons for advocating open standards. It's also why many public records are stored on microfiche or paper, because neither of those formats are dependent on proprietary technology.

I'd definitely go for a DVD burner for backups over tape. Some external hard drive storage--like the network-attached storage device we use at home--supports mirroring and/or RAID array.

:happy:
 
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