S
spazstic
Now that I've got your attention, I need some genius help here!
Usually I can just search Google to find my answer, but this issue I
can find no solution other than reloading XP, which I'd like to avoid.
My question is lenghty, my apologies, but this is my first question on
any forum so please be patient!
Last week has been fun. I've got a P4, 1.6GHZ, 768mb RAM. I'm running a
2002 version of XP Pro with SP1 installed (no SP2). I run two Maxtor
80gb hdds (non RAID), one for my OS (XP) and one to store all my
pictures, music, video etc. You know, everything valuable to me,
everything kept over the last 8 years or so. It is seperate from my OS
to keep it "safe". For some reason unknown to me, while trying to boot
one morning, XP came up with a screen which read corruption on disk D,
label Trailer (my secondary HDD). It ran CHKDSK and found many
corruptions. I was unable to start my PC with D: connected. Running off
another computer, the same issue happened. When the drive was
disconnected, everything ran fine.
When I tried the disk in my mom's computer, which is much faster (P4 HT
2.8GHZ w/ 2gb RAM) it was able to temporarily read the HDD, which came
up saying the HDD was formatted in RAW, but size was at 0kb. It is
really NTFS. Soon after, the disk began making mechanical clicking
noises. I quit messing with it and took it to a PC shop which provided
free estimates. Their PCs were unable to read it as well. DriveSavers
seems to be the last resort, but I cannot spend more than $200-300
trying to recover this information.
So, my first quesiton would be if anyone has any ideas as to how I can
get the information off this drive, and do so cheaply. I've already
pretty much condemned the damn thing, and begun to assess my losses.
The real bitch of it all was that I've been pricing out external HDDs
lately and just had not purchased one yet. Little information was
backed up.
So now I've begun the long process of going through old CDs attempting
to salvage what I can. I bought a Western Digital 120GB USB 2.0
external HDD to keep as a disconnected backup. Anyway, here is my
second problem.
The hard drive could not be found by XP, so after many attempts at
reloading the drivers, I reinstalled XP. Now the HDD can be found.
Problem was, it was operating at "low speed USB", you know that
message, "high speed USB in non-high speed port". When I clicked on it,
it said that there were no high speed USB drives attached. I've got an
Adaptec 3 port USB 2.0, 2 port firewire combo card in. I downloaded the
driver off their web site which was supposed to allow USB 2.0 speed.
Except the PC crashed when trying to update the driver.
Well, not exactly. A blue screen appears which states Windows was shut
down because of a bad driver. It then says if this is the first time
you've seen this screen... and so on. If the HDD isn't connencted
everything is ok, and I can run XP fine (as I'm doing so now). But if I
plug the drive in, XP loads the bad drivers, and XP crashes. I'm sure I
can edit the registry or something to remove these drivers, but I'm
just not sure how to, and I don't want to total my system. Or I could
roll the drivers back if it didn't crash. Which actually brings me to
another issue.
I though I might be able to do something through safe mode. But trying
to boot in safe mode is a waste of time. My PC just takes longer, and
eventually just boots normally anyway. I first noticed the problem when
I was trying to access the bad HDD. It used to boot in safe mode fine,
and it will not now, even after a restore of XP. But that is not so
much a problem as trying to remove the bad driver(s).
Like I said, I couldn't find any help searching Google, so if anyone
has any information that could help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it!
Usually I can just search Google to find my answer, but this issue I
can find no solution other than reloading XP, which I'd like to avoid.
My question is lenghty, my apologies, but this is my first question on
any forum so please be patient!
Last week has been fun. I've got a P4, 1.6GHZ, 768mb RAM. I'm running a
2002 version of XP Pro with SP1 installed (no SP2). I run two Maxtor
80gb hdds (non RAID), one for my OS (XP) and one to store all my
pictures, music, video etc. You know, everything valuable to me,
everything kept over the last 8 years or so. It is seperate from my OS
to keep it "safe". For some reason unknown to me, while trying to boot
one morning, XP came up with a screen which read corruption on disk D,
label Trailer (my secondary HDD). It ran CHKDSK and found many
corruptions. I was unable to start my PC with D: connected. Running off
another computer, the same issue happened. When the drive was
disconnected, everything ran fine.
When I tried the disk in my mom's computer, which is much faster (P4 HT
2.8GHZ w/ 2gb RAM) it was able to temporarily read the HDD, which came
up saying the HDD was formatted in RAW, but size was at 0kb. It is
really NTFS. Soon after, the disk began making mechanical clicking
noises. I quit messing with it and took it to a PC shop which provided
free estimates. Their PCs were unable to read it as well. DriveSavers
seems to be the last resort, but I cannot spend more than $200-300
trying to recover this information.
So, my first quesiton would be if anyone has any ideas as to how I can
get the information off this drive, and do so cheaply. I've already
pretty much condemned the damn thing, and begun to assess my losses.
The real bitch of it all was that I've been pricing out external HDDs
lately and just had not purchased one yet. Little information was
backed up.
So now I've begun the long process of going through old CDs attempting
to salvage what I can. I bought a Western Digital 120GB USB 2.0
external HDD to keep as a disconnected backup. Anyway, here is my
second problem.
The hard drive could not be found by XP, so after many attempts at
reloading the drivers, I reinstalled XP. Now the HDD can be found.
Problem was, it was operating at "low speed USB", you know that
message, "high speed USB in non-high speed port". When I clicked on it,
it said that there were no high speed USB drives attached. I've got an
Adaptec 3 port USB 2.0, 2 port firewire combo card in. I downloaded the
driver off their web site which was supposed to allow USB 2.0 speed.
Except the PC crashed when trying to update the driver.
Well, not exactly. A blue screen appears which states Windows was shut
down because of a bad driver. It then says if this is the first time
you've seen this screen... and so on. If the HDD isn't connencted
everything is ok, and I can run XP fine (as I'm doing so now). But if I
plug the drive in, XP loads the bad drivers, and XP crashes. I'm sure I
can edit the registry or something to remove these drivers, but I'm
just not sure how to, and I don't want to total my system. Or I could
roll the drivers back if it didn't crash. Which actually brings me to
another issue.
I though I might be able to do something through safe mode. But trying
to boot in safe mode is a waste of time. My PC just takes longer, and
eventually just boots normally anyway. I first noticed the problem when
I was trying to access the bad HDD. It used to boot in safe mode fine,
and it will not now, even after a restore of XP. But that is not so
much a problem as trying to remove the bad driver(s).
Like I said, I couldn't find any help searching Google, so if anyone
has any information that could help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it!