visuals4u said:
For the first time after starting my computer, I received a message on DOS
saying the following:
"Hard disk failure is imminent. Please back up and replace your hard drive!"
What has happened? I have restored it numerous times due to viruses &
crashes and have never rec'd this message. Can anyone explain?
There is a remote possibility the file system on C: is already damaged.
Based on your previous report...
http://groups.google.ca/group/micro...read/thread/2bc501e0231f844d/fd3448d5362672da
I would make sure, at least the data files are copied to another
computer. Because prebuilt computers have multiple partitions,
ensuring all necessary data is copied, can be complicated.
At the very least, you could use file sharing, to copy files
off the damaged computer, before it is too late. That would
include things, like the email database file or files.
I use Linux and "dd", to make exact copies of one disk to
another. But it is pretty hard to describe a simple
recipe, that covers all possible situations.
If you buy a replacement disk from Seagate, they have a utility
to do the copying. But I don't know if it can see and copy
your recovery partition properly.
(Free Seagate DiscWizard software)
http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf
To see how many partitions are on the disk, you can use tools
like this, downloadable from Symantec FTP. *Don't* change
anything in here - this is just for a quick look, so you can
see whether there are three of four possible partitions defined
or not. Unzip the file and use the executable. The first one,
shows the raw numbers for the partition table.
Raw numbers.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTEDIT32.zip
More or less like Disk Management.
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PartInNT.zip
This is a PTEDIT32 screen image (or close to it). My purpose in showing
that, is to show there are at least three entries in the partition
table here. So any copy software should be handling all of them.
"dd" would do that with no effort, as it doesn't care about the
details, and just copies everything.
http://www.raymond.cc/images/partedit32.png
The two "07" partitions, are NTFS. And according to this, the 0x27
partition entry, is "PQService" type on an Acer laptop. That
might be considered a "foreign" partition type, and my question
would be, whether DiskWizard would copy it OK or not.
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html
Paul
