I killed my Computer :(

[Richard_Cranium72]

At Moms now, 20miles away, I tried to "wipe" a disc this morn.

A WD 2.1, it has been running, just had lots of old registry files from a couple of pewters so I wanted a fresh start.

Hooked it up as master on the cd-rom cable and re-booted.

aaaaghh, "invalid system disc, remove and hit any key' or whatever.

Removed the hd, put things back the way they were, and NO GO.

I've got a closet unit I'll drag out later today with a blazing 9600 modem and check back later.

checked the cables twice, the hd in the failed unit is a maxtor 7200 diamond max, uhhh, I think 12gb? I Forget.

btw, I DID search for my prob before whining here.

thanx

DrVette

[Emc2]

You're saying you formatted the primary harddrive (C:\)? It's saying that it's an invalid system disk because there's no command.com on it. Command.com is used to get from machine language to software language.

You need to format a floppy on your mom's computer, and choose the selection "only copy system files". You should also find drivers for your CD-ROM and put them on the same disk. Your two DOS startup files, autoexec.bat and config.sys should be used to load the CD-ROM drivers. Then just setup windows from the cd-rom. Also, your harddrive should always be master on the primary IDE cable, not the CD-ROM cable.

If you still have questions, post them. This happened to me but luckily I worked my way out of it.

[alpha]

You did check to see if there was a disk in the floppy drive before getting worried, didn't you??

[Richard_Cranium72]

No floppy in the LS-120 drive.

I didn't format anything. The NEC I killed has the Maxtor 13.6.

The WD 2.1 is from the HP. It is what I'm using NOW. The disc that I killed the NEC with.

Come to think of it, I got a wierd e-mail.
I posted part of it, err, somewhere. Wonder if somebody sent me a bug?

Can I install the command.com without wiping the HD?

There is a ton of links on it that I got at sysopt and scads of great info. Like the magic wand to fix the registry.
Reg/restore or reg/fix or whatever.

I KNEW better than to rely on just one machine for all my stuff.. boo hoo.

Maybe with help from my pals at SYSOPT, I'll stumble my way clear.

Thanx, DrVette

[Stembolt]

DrVette, it's probably just me, but I'm confused. Would you mind restating exactly what happened? And what did you mean by "wipe" if you don't mean format?

Sorry for the inconvenience. Maybe I'm just not thinking straight. :-)

[Richard_Cranium72]

"Wipe" is bc wipe, I think a low level format too. It writes 0's and 1's to the disc taking away all shadows of previous magnetic impulses stored on the HD.

To reiterate.

My HP disc is a WD, old and full of junk. All the removal you can do leaves lots of garbage filling up the disc.

My NEC, is now daid. From the disc or the Weird E-mail, I dunno. ->> http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/Forum17/HTML/000796.html

I put the WD into the NEC, using the CD-Rom cable and left it on Master.

I planned to go to bios and change it to "Secondary Master" but never got that far.

It never makes it to bios, just post and a message
"Non-System disk or disk error
Replace and strike any key when ready"

So, did some dust mites jump off the WD into the Maxtor and because the WD was running at 5400 and the Maxtor at 7200 the mites were slung off and messed up the pickup arm?

Can I "sys c" without losing data?

Thanks, DrVette

[CujoRbd]

if you have Win98 (or newer) on the 'puter you're on now, then just make a boot disk with it and stick it into the "dead" machine. this should allow you to atleast save your files, or even be able to copy needed system files (command.com, etc.) to it.

just try this and see what happens.

if you don't have 98, or the above doesn't work, then post back and we'll help you through it.


CujoRbd

[Stembolt]

DrVette, you should be able to access the bios before the computer searches for a system disk. As already posted, try to boot from floppy (must have system files on it). If the machine boots, you then know the problem is harddrive related. It could be data corruption from a virus, failing HD, or some kind of hardware configuration problem.

Check to see if it boots to floppy and post back.

BTW, I like your dust mite theory. :-)

[Richard_Cranium72]

Otay, did the sys c: thingy, no good.

system starts, shows Win98 splash screen, then anti-virus screen.

Scanning Memory...OK
Scanning Master Boot Records...OK
Scanning Boot Record...OK
Scanning files...Done

then I get a dos prompt->>

C:\>

gee, I dunno.
This thing has run fine for about 6 months.
When I did the cd-rom unplug for the Maxtor wipe, boom.

?

DrVette

[DHatAVI]

If all of your folders are still there, then my next guess is that you will need to replace the 'MSDOS.SYS' file. when you did the 'sys c:' it probably transfered the msdos.sys file from the boot disk to the root dirrectory on c:. The MSDOS.sys file on the boot disk is the basic file and not the one your system requires to start windows. The MSDOS.sys file is the one that starts windows. It is a hidden file and will not show up without removing it's hidden and system attributes. You may find a copy of the MSDOS.sys file in your windows folder that you can copy to the root folder, or you can copy it from another computer that is running the same OS. But remember, if you copy it from another machine by using windows, it wont show up on the disk until you change its attributes under DOS or when you copy it, that would be a good time to change it by accessing its properties.

David

[This message has been edited by DHatAVI (edited 08-20-2000).]

[Richard_Cranium72]

Thanks Dave, but I haven't a clue as to the method for that. I'm dos illiterate, renaming in dos, gee I dunno.

It appears as if a nasty has arrived, I have three HD's that won't boot. Granted they are old and one has been a problem for a year or more. But, I think the Email had someting nasty, I got another one today, different but still encrypted or Chinese??

The drives steadilly got worse, first a no-boot, then no fdisk, tried a low level. OK, wrong! Soon disk won't wipe, chkdisk says OK, Scandisk says OK. Still don't wipe.

Then they won't copy files, they then won't format, "can't determine drive type" or ,,
Soon Win BSOD if ya try to access disk!!

Get that thing out and hope the bios ain't screwed.

Dead HD's , Quantum Bigfoot 8.4 , WD 2.1 , Maxtor 1.6 .
Tme for a HD funeral, http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/frown.gif

DrVette

[jeana]

Hey DrVette,

If I remember rightly, renaming in DOS is as simple as typing
"ren oldfilename newfilename"
at the DOS prompt.

Also, from under DOS you can make hidden files visible using attrib.exe (one of the many useful files now found in Windows/command). Again my memory of the exact syntax is a little shaky, but I _think_ "dir /ah" will show you all the hidden files on a directory, "dir /as" will show you all the system files, and "dir /ar" shows all read-only files. "dir /ashr" will show you the invisible, system, read-only files. Typing something like "attrib -h msdos.sys" should make msdos.sys visible until you decide to hide it again with "attrib +h msdos.sys". If you wanted to make all of the files in a directory visible, non-system, and writeable, I think the command is "attrib -shr *.*". Or "attrib -h -r -s". Something like that, you get the idea.

Darn it, my memory is going.

If none of this works and you have valuable data on there have you considered springing the $$ for Spinrite? (At www.grc.com (http://www.grc.com) from the nice man who gave us Zone Alarm and Opt Out.) It might be able to salvage things long enough to back them up somewhere else. And, it will help keep your flock of hard drives in good shape for the future, provided that the problem isn't a virus.

Good luck!
Jeana

Oops, sorry about miscrediting ZoneAlarm. I told you, my memory is shot to heck... I zoned. :P

[This message has been edited by jeana (edited 08-22-2000).]

[Stembolt]

It's been a long time, but here are a few other basic DOS commands:

DIR - shows what is in a directory.
DIR /P - directory contents 1 page at a time.
CD xxx - change directory. (xxx = dir name)
CD.. - moves back in dir tree.

Also COPY, DELETE, RENAME, TYPE, etc. Be sure to include complete path and filenames including extensions. There are many others, but this should be enough for standard navigation.

BTW, Steve Gibson brought us SpinRite and OptOut, but ZoneLabs gave us ZoneAlarm. He has helped to promote ZoneAlarm, though. Steve Gibson at http://grc.com/default.htm writes all of his programs in pure assembler, so they are small and fast (relatively speaking). Get over to his site and look around, everyone. He is really trying to help us all when it comes to internet security.

Sorry about getting off-topic. Next time I'll start a new one. :-)

[DuhWhat]

OK... I know I am new to posting to the forum thing... all of like 5 hours now http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif but I am still a little confused about what is going on.
When you boot up Win98 and it goes to the C: prompt, do you still have a windows directory and everything? It may seem a bit archaic, but can you just type "win"?
As for the WD drive as master on the CD-ROM cable... are you saying that you unplugged the IDE cable from the CD-ROM and hooked the drive up to it? Did the bios detect the hard drive and everything?
I'm not an expert here or anything, but I think you are looking at multiple problems, none of them are necessarily related to one another. (I get email from half a dozen Asian countries because I was dumb enough to post my real email address on ICQ. I removed it, but I've been getting messages periodicly ever since. Anyway... none of them contained viruses... as best I can tell they were links to either Asian porn sites or illegal software vendors. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif ) So... all that is to say that I don't think you have a virus.
Back to Stembolt's comment, you should be able to see BIOS settings before the machine boots. If the bios is set to enable fast boot, it won't show the IDE drives it detects. You may want to check that bios setting. My guess is that the BIOS is not setting the drives up correctly and thus all your other grievances.
I've had drives that I could read the directories and even change directories, but not launch any of the files. It was because the bios autodetected the drive incorrectly. It got the cylinders/head/sectors correct, but screwed up on the LBA/Large/Normal option.
I hope this makes sense... if not, let me know and I will try explaining again. Thanks for your patience. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[Richard_Cranium72]

the known facts;

1.Two dead HD's possibly 3.
2.They all had the same symptoms after being connected to a machine with a questionable e-mail and subsequent fail to boot to Win98 o/s.
3.The HD's failed to fdisk.
4.Format OK, sys c OK, CHKDISK OK,
5.Refusal to accept dos command "setup"
6.Register in second machine as OK, post ok as 2nd slave
7.Format in Win OK, Scandisk in Win OK.
8.BC Wipe fails at midway point.
9.Format in Win OK.
10.Failure to copy system files
11.Failure to start Wipe
12.Shows in Win OK, percentage free space 0.0%
13.Failure to format.
14.Fail to scandisk.
15.Fail to be seen in Win98 "My Computer" message "cannot identify drive type"
16.Clicking on ICON gives BSOD!!


So these two steadily went downhill from refusal to setup all the way to BSOD just by click on icon..

Disc history,
Q.B'foot 8.4 is 1998 July, thousands of hours. Original failure from removal of audio codecs.
Maxtor 1.6, scrap heap special. Unknown hours or yr of mfg. Ran win95 for a year or so giving windows protection errors every now and then. Connected to failed machine in attempt to boot, transferred problem to HP from NEC.
I've mistakenly id'd the other one, it is a Maxtor 27.2 @ 7200. sniff. It has a 4 month time of usage. Original fail a couple of days ago due to E-mail as best as I can tell.

Obviously the BIOS is unaffected in one of the two machines cause I've got it running with a secondary HD.

I did type win at the dos prompt and winwx, this one used to work in a Compulock win95.

Thanks for understanding the intellectually challenged Dr.
DrVette



[This message has been edited by Richard_Cranium72 (edited 08-23-2000).]

[Richard_Cranium72]

Something maybe important I FORGOT to tell.

On one shutdown, when clicking the Start, Nothing happened.
After 4-5 tries, a Blue vertical bar 11mm or 7/16" wide and 2/3 the screen height jumped up with Microsoft written on it.

Today I re-tried the Quant 8.4 and the machine went to Blue HP screen with a dark bar in the upper left corner with some symbols like }B' and a Heart.
I had pushed f1 to go into BIOS but this came up instead.
Had to power off, then long delay, NO POST, finally Blue HP screen.

5 min later, no change,

Next try took about 8-10 to boot, message "Windows did not shut down properly, default settings something" ,
Did boot finally, sys res at 95%, 28mb Ram, 380 mb of 2011mb(FAT)

I've run lots of these with 32-192 mb RAM with little if any lags incurred. Don't game.
I watch the swap file, and sys resources and the thing does OK. Don't run Office 2000, or my Corel Photo8 or other large apps on the surfers.
fyi


DrVette

[DHatAVI]

How about checking the power supply output voltages?

David

[DuhWhat]

Man... you have some of the most interesting problems. Did you look for white smoke or little gnomes? http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif OK, let me see if I am following you... (BTW... I admire your patience, I probably would have thrown the drives across the room or hit them with a hammer to "loosen the drive heads" or some such nonsense.)

On the Quantum drive... I've seen the goofy characters and faces when a disk management utility was trying to load. The particular disk management program I am thinking of was used on a P100 machine where the BIOS didn't recognize drives bigger than ~1GB. The fact the Windows comes up and only sees 2GB, makes me think either 1. you are running an older version of win95, 2. the drive is partitioned in 2GB sections (which you needed to do in some versions of Win95), 3. the bios is not identifying the drive correctly.

Can you tell me what motherboad you are using and what bios version? Which Win95 version are you using? Let's start with one drive and one system and work from there. If we get this one working, we can move on to the Maxtor 27.2 GB.

As for the "intellectually challenged", there is a reason this is my favorite username. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif Thanks for your patience.

[Richard_Cranium72]

With so many drives and problems, I get folks confused.
Lets refer to the HP for now.

The Quan 8.4 was in the HP.
It was infected by the WD 2.1 which I put to the NEC to hopefully boot it, then returned to the HP which was unbootable due to removal of audio codecs , per MS instructions.
The Quantum has never shown bad sectors for that matter none of my discs ever have.
The Quan showed ZERO percent free space, not 2gb.
The Quan had Win98 on it.
The Max 1.6 had 95 that had shown windows protection errors.

The quan is the one that does the super wierd stuff, it's orig equip on the HP 6350.
The video was wierd too, the previous page that was closed had fragments all over it, getting worse till illegible, re-boot OK.
Change refresh from 72 to 75hz fixed that prob.

Then came the blue bar instead of the start menu jump, whatever it's called.
When I put the quantum back in on Tue, the HP bogged badly, Oddly enough, the WD has not suffered damage as I am using it NOW.
It is the one that I transfered from the HP to the NEC.
The Maxtor 1.6 was a Win95 disc and had been overwritten, low level format, bc wiped or whatever before I stuck it in.
So, two working drives quit at the same time, I haven't had the heart to try the biggie for rigormortis just yet http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

btw, Dell is looking better and better. I don't have the time to fight with these things forever. I will try to get them running well enough to sell them though..

[DuhWhat]

OK... so what is your master/slave primary/secondary drive configuration? I ask because you have to move a jumper on the Quantum to change it between master and slave and it's not terribly obvious.

Right now I am thinking that the problem is that the bios is incorrectly detecting the drive. So check the following... Hit F1 and go into the bios and see what settings it has for the Quantum drive. It should read the following:
16384 Cylinders, 16 heads, 63 Sectors
with LBA enabled. If it doesn't read this then you need to change the bios settings or the little jumper on the drive.
Let me know what you've got.

[Richard_Cranium72]

Currently, the HP is in a dozen pieces.

I had to completely disassemble it to remove the HD to see the s/n for warranty info at quantum website. "No Warranty for OEM drives, contact your vendor"

Chicken shxx, azzholz..grr

Anyway, when I get this thing together I'll do it. The Quantum is backward to other drives I've had, the slave position is NO JUMPER!!

Maybe you have something there, hope hope..

Oh yea, I did the Norton emer boot thingy,, NO BUGGIES DETECTED.
It might help if the discs were a little newer than 18 months old. oops

cya,,
DrVette

[smokin1]

Whew!..with all that's gone on it's really hard to tell, but time to go to the basics...
BCwipe gets rid of everything pretty much...but...make sure the HD is set properly as master...one HD at a time..I know you have three...then go to bios and make sure it is properly recognized, and get rid of any other slaves or secondary masters for the time being..does it identify the drive?..if so..on to step two..

[jit333]

Why do you torture yourself like this DrVette?

[DuhWhat]

Good luck on getting the Quantum back up and running. I've had enough experience (i.e. - mishaps) with old drives that I generally end up going to the manufacturers site when they do weird stuff.

I know I was only going to make you work on one problem at a time, but I thought I might mention that Maxtor has a nice little utility you should be able to use on your 2 Maxtor drives. Try the following link: http://www.maxtor.com/technology/infobulls/15005.html
It has some general info about troubleshooting Maxtor drives and a utility to test your drive integrity. Check it out and let me know what's up

Good luck.

[Richard_Cranium72]

I love to torture myself almost as much as I like to torture the Warthog http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

The current status is Quantum as Master, jumper ON 1st pin, solo HD.

Did the fdisk, OK
Did the chkdisk, Fail!
Did the format c: /s ,
"format complete."
"Error writing to directory."
"Format terminated"

So, sys c: , HOPE HOPE
wrong, "invalid media type reading drive C"
OK, try "Setup" HOPE
"Bad command or file name

Hey! Gene C
Got ya a target here!!
http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

oh well,
Gonna try the utility I got from Quantum, some disk overwriting tool.
see ya

[Richard_Cranium72]

grrr,

"Checking existing disk fromat.
Formatting 7,663.32M
Format Complete.
Writing out file allocation table
11 percent complete.

!! Attention !! a Serious disk error has
occurred while writing to drive c.
Retry (r)? _

[Warthog]

What was that??

You can't sneak anything by me, Doc....hehehe http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

Warthog

[This message has been edited by Warthog (edited 08-25-2000).]

[smokin1]

Hmmm, that doesn't sound good. It seems a though you may have a boot sector virus. You might want to try a program to recover. There are a few out there, like Spin Rite from Gibson Research, or this one..free trial http://www.datadepo.com/drivemaster2000.htm
or maybe try an fdisk /mbr..but that can potentially cause problems if there was indeed a boot sector virus.

[Richard_Cranium72]

Well, now I KNOW what is wrong with the HD.

Physical damage.

I opened it up and found a piece of something like a figure 8 on the disc surface.
It was about 1/64" wide and 1/8" long, huge for a super polished surface. There was another one on the end of the visible pickup arm, whatever you call that dohickey..

At first I thought it was a piece of lint cause I was in my basement and the air is full of dust, so I blew on it. no luck
I thought, what the heck, it's ruined anyway, so I used my T shirt and tried to lightly brush it away.. nooooo
I rubbed harder, finally it came loose with a snap.. kinda like welding spatter.

I'm sure it's toast, but I just gotta try to run it again.

The surface showed no marks after removal, and yes I'm wearing my glasses http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

So, there goes my virus theory.

let ya know what happens next..

DrVette

[Richard_Cranium72]

Time for butter and Jam, this baby's Toast !!

Put it all back together making sure all the screws went back right.
Stopped up the inspection ports with tape to keep air pressure in, if that is what they are for.
Got all the dust off the mirror.
Put it together, and, click click click click

Say what, it wasn't doing that before.

Took it back apart, no good.
Must have let out that magic air that was inside.
The thing was put back exactly as it came apart, I think anyway..

Any pro's on that?

Heard someone a while back talking about their bad drive doing that, seeking and slamming against the spindle.

Mine is slamming against the rest, the air vane is moving OK, no obvious problems .. ?

[pickel]

Break out the Pall bearers and the hearse. Sounds like a sad day in GA. Accept my wholehearted sympathies and hoping for a speedy recovery. You need to hook up with JAD 1097. If it wasn't for bad luck ,ya'll have none at all!!!! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif


the pickel

[DuhWhat]

The stuff in the figure 8 is a vibration dampening adhesive added to the surface of hard drives to keep the platter from vibrating against the case. Did you throw it away? Maybe you could try putting it back on and see if that works.

Just kidding.. It's Monday morning and I have to mess with someone to get the week started off right. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif So are you ready to try out the Maxtor drives and get them working? If so, you may want to start a new thread... this one is getting awefully long. Let us know what happens.

Best of luck.

[Richard_Cranium72]

Ok, will do, I was hoping someone could tell me why the thing started to do the search and slam deal,, AFTER I opened the case up.

The disc surface is clean NOW, I'm sure the debris was the whole problem all along.

I had this thing sold for $400 BEFORE it quit on me,,, http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/frown.gif
Oh, well, I have some HD's coming in hopefully on Tue the 29th, I'll put a couple of them in it and maybe out she goes.. later gang,
btw, Pickel, you've been nominated as a Pall Bearer http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[thxmanu]

You do know, of course, that hard drives should only be opened in a clean room (class 10 or better). Just FYI.

[Warthog]

Doc, I think it's your "magic touch" at work in that comp. Maybe ya should let someone "more experienced" do the work... http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

Warthog