I have a laptop whose battier is dead. During booting up the power
cord became unplugged from the transformer. When I tried to reboot I
got a message about a second partition, which I did not have on the
hard drive. I assumed scandisk would run automatically and things
would straighten out. In my early try at getting the hard drive to
boot I also got a message that WINDOWS 98 HAS DECTECTED THAT DRIVE C
DOES NOT CONTAIN A VALID FAT or FAT32 PARTITION.
Here are some of the things I have tried and the messages I then got:
When I tried to install windows 98SE from the CD I got. SET UP CANNOT
INSTALL WINDOWS 98ON YOUR COMPUTER AN ERROR WAS DETECTED WHILE TRYING
TO READ OR WRITE TO YOUR HARD DISK

I tried at the a and then at the D and the C prompt FDISK I got one
set in where it asks to enable large disk support (my HD is 6.5 GB) I
tried yes first then no but both times it said ERROR READING FIXED
DISK Tried A:\>format c:/s still no luck.
Winbook the laptop manufacturer had some instructions on reinstalling
the OS. I tried with the CD in D:\win98> C: and get INVALID DRIVE
SPECIFICATIONS. When D was in and booted from I no longer could get a
C prompt to come up at all. Could get an A prompt then typed C: after
it but got the same error message. Got to an A prompt an again and
tried C:\windows\command\deltree.exe and got same error message as
above. I booted with the floppy and tried all the above still no use.
I got BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME. Then tried C:\windows and got CDR101:
not ready reading drive D abort retry. I put the CD in and hit retry
and got BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME. I am using a boot floppy that makes
a Ramdisk and at start up it does say THE DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS WERE
SUCCESSFULLY LOADED TO DRIVE C. Does this really mean that they were
loaded in RAM and not on the C drive since it seems I can't read or
write to it?

I have run scandisk and it reports no problem with C drive.
In the start up I see that my primary master IDE drive shows and in
the blue screen BIOS under Auto detect hard disk it shows and all
seems ok as far as the specs only the serial number does not show
anything. At startup the drive access light flashes and I can here it.
At start up it says pri master hard drive S.M.A.R.T. Command failed. I
think this is the first roadblock problem why I can't boot. I changed
it from auto in the advanced setup to disabled still no luck. What
exactly is S.M.A.R.T.?

I then got a diagnostic bootable CD from Hitachi the hard drive maker
and ran their DRIVE FITNESS TEST. It reported one or more corrupted
sectors found. When I said fix the sector it failed. I then tried to
erase the disk using their program and also got a failed.
My question from above is how can a hard drive that I never had a
problem with go bad because of the power going off but still appear to
the computer as being there with drive lamp working? Is there code
always on the hard drive that is not in its ROM that is screwed up and
I will never be able to right that. Could I have done in some RAM
(firmware setting) contained and set in its circuit board that I will
never be able to fix? My last information in this novel I have posted
here is that the Hitachi utility reported FAILURE CODE 0x75 DEFECTIVE
DEVICE COMPONENT FAILED TECHNICAL RESULT CODE 7573DCF0. Again how can
scan disk say no problem and the manufacturer's utility says failure
with hardware?

"DJW" <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:357ca725-8c47-4ee6-99a6-297f0ae8b7ee@34g2000hsz.googlegroups.com...
The hard drive is defective, misconfigured or not properly connected.

Windows 98 setup creates a RAM drive using the next available drive
letter. If DOS doesn't find a hard drive during bootup, the next available
drive letter is "C:".

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Mo...ing_Technology

Scandisk was checking the RAM drive and the Hitachi application was
trying to access the hard drive. Try a known good hard drive or put the
one with the problem in a known good computer. If these options are
impractical, try removing and reinserting the hard drive, since poor
connections can cause this kind of problem.

Ben

DJW wrote:
It is just possible you might have had and not known it - some laptop
manufacturers set up a tiny one, containing I think the BIOS settings or
something (My Toshiba 1750 does). This is not visible as a drive D: or
anything in Windows (or even DOS), or at least it may not be (isn't on
mine).

(I don't think this is relevant to your case though.)

No, for scandisk to run, it needs to at least partly boot (to read the
scandisk executable if nothing else!), which it can't if the HD is corrupted
in the wrong way.

I presume you were booting from a floppy (or CD) at that point - if from the
C: drive, then it is odd, because where did the operating system that is
telling you that come from! Assuming you are from a floppy or CD, then yes,
you'd get that message if the HD was either damaged or corrupted.

I've never tried booting from the W98SE CD, so I don't know if it tries to
do an FDISK if it can't read the HD.
Yes, IIRR the "large" disc is one over half a gigabyte (I think the FDISK
utility is somewhat older than '98!).

Hmm. That sounds very much as if the hardware is not responding. It might be
worth just waggling its connectors (after all, its worth anything at this
point), but I suspect it's dead. Even if it were to have been scrambled
beyond what FDISK can fix (this can happen), "error reading" suggests a
hardware fault: with something else (such as an NTFS partition), FDISK
should still be able to see the hardware.

No, format is only used once there are FAT (usually FAT32) partitions there.
(FDISK makes partitions.)

Any DOS command that starts C:\... (I mean you type that, not it there as
the prompt) is trying to run something from the C: drive, which will fail if
the C: drive isn't responding or hasn't got a recognisable and formatted
partition.
[]
Yes. That boot floppy makes a RAM drive, which it gives the first free
letter: A: (and B: for historical reasons) are reserved for floppy drives,
so you'd normally expect the RAMdrive to be D: (and the CD drive to be E: if
you booted with CD support, which is the default). The fact that it has used
C: suggests that that letter wasn't taken, i. e. no recognised hard drive.
That is extremely puzzling - oh, did you mean after booting from that
floppy? If so, then scandisk was checking the RAMdrive that the floppy
created! (It should have responded virtually instantly if that is the case;
a scandisk of a hard drive should take minutes or hours.)

Hmm, that _sort_ of suggests the (E)IDE controller might be working (that
was another think I thought about), as well as the _electronics_ of the
drive. (So many different kinds of drive, BIOS, controller, etc. - I don't
know if they all do report their serial number.)

I can't remember exactly what it stands for, but its some self-diagnostic
capability that has been in hard drives (and a few other things) for quite a
few years now.
This does sound like it's genuinely dud. One thing that might be worth a try
is putting it into another computer and running the same diagnostic -
obviously you'd have to buy (or borrow, ideally) a drive connector adaptor,
unless the other PC is a laptop too; however, I don't hold out much hope.

The "appearing to be there" and the lamp working only tell you that the
electronics of the drive are working (or partially so); they don't tell you
whether it's physically actually going round, or the head moving, or not. (A
bit like a tape recorder where the motor has failed - it will still relay
signals from its inputs to its outputs, light its meters, and so on.)

That does sound like a fairly definite hardware fault. I _think_ scandisk
was scanning the RAM drive that your floppy made (i. e. part of the PCs RAM
set aside to look like a disc). Run scandisk again, and select surface scan
when it gets to that point: it should tell you how long it thinks it's going
to take, and this should definitely be at the least a matter of minutes -
could be hours, but if it's seconds, you're not scanning the hard drive. If
you do get to the point where it's running the surface scan, I _think_ you
should be able to hear it (a) spinning and (b) moving the head (a click from
once or twice a second to every few seconds), though I'm not too sure how
audible these are with a laptop drive. (The manufacturer's utility would
have made similar noises, anyway.) Doing a

DIR

on the same disc letter as you're running scandisk on will also confirm it
(i. e. if you're doing "scandisk C:", or even just "scandisk", then do "dir
C:" or just "dir"), from the size: the amount of free space shown by DOS DIR
is in bytes, not K or M or G, so if it's a nine or less digit number, you're
not looking at the HD. (I might be wrong about it being in bytes - but if it
is in KB or MB, I'm pretty sure it says so with a K or an M.)

When you had the mishap with the power cable, did you at the same time jerk
the laptop? (Though even if you didn't, you could still have been unlucky
and caused damage - they're _usually_ fairly robust against power
interruptions, especially laptop drives, but not entirely. Come to think of
it, the robustness is to some extent that they use the rotational energy of
the drive to lift the heads away and park them safely, but if you
interrupted it while it was spinning up, it wouldn't _have_ that energy to
use, so could well have crashed and damaged a sector - and if it did hard
enough to do that, possibly the head as well.)
--
J. P. Gilliver | Tel. +44 1634 203298

Essex home for sale, £59,950: see http://www.soft255.demon.co.uk/home/

"DJW" <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:357ca725-8c47-4ee6-99a6-297f0ae8b7ee@34g2000hsz.googlegroups.com...
That's a bios monitor for your HD.

It has at least partially failed

On Feb 28, 3:02 pm, "philo" <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:
I have plugged and unplugged it four times already. If the CMOS
battery was dead would if had not keep the time could this be the
problem. No it did not get moved at all and I think I do hear the
thing spin and the actuator move when I see the access lamp flash..
The scandisk did happen very fast. So if I boot with a floppy A what
would be the command line to try the scan disk? I saw on bootdisk.com
a floppy maker that had no ramdisk should I make it and try it and see
what happens would that be easier for me to scandisk with out
confusion? Could the firmware be screwed up? I never had a problem
before the plug got pulled out at startup.

"DJW" <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:6072c3e4-97ae-4cc3-bb5e-224dae2b459a@h25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...

Though you can run scandisk C: from the floppy
it will only repair logical errors ***which could possibly make things
worse***

scandisk will correct logical errors, it could possibly write any data you
have into chk files.

at any rate, if a drive registers a SMART error it *must* be replaced

Your best chance to at least recover your data would be to slave the drive
into
another computer...
laptop to IDE adaptors are only a few $$$ and avail at most any computer
parts vendor

"DJW" <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:6072c3e4-97ae-4cc3-bb5e-224dae2b459a@h25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...

Though you can run scandisk C: from the floppy
it will only repair logical errors ***which could possibly make things
worse***

scandisk will correct logical errors, it could possibly write any data you
have into chk files.

at any rate, if a drive registers a SMART error it *must* be replaced

Your best chance to at least recover your data would be to slave the drive
into
another computer...
laptop to IDE adaptors are only a few $$$ and avail at most any computer
parts vendor

On Feb 28, 5:36 pm, "philo" <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:
Well if the drive is dead I still wonder why a working drive went to
hell because of a power failure during booting. I tried the boot
floppy with out a ram disk maker on it and now a scandisk of C returns
errors that it cannot be done. As far as an adaptor for putting this
in my desktop machine I think my money would be best spent getting a
different drive from ebay. I am worried that could be a waste of
money. What if the problem here is with the computer and the IDE bus
in some way? What about this CMOS battery I heard of. What exactly
does it do and could it being dead or weak cause a problem? I see
nothing in my computers manual about it and have had all but the ram
access panels open and never saw what I assume may be a button or
camera style of battery. Does the average laptop have to have a major
crake it open to get to it?

DJW wrote:
from '93
Try to figure out the brand of the hard disk and download the software
for it. My dead 200 gig Maxtor disk was revived by a low level format
and is still running after 8 years.
Getting a hard disk out is no real problem, just be secure and work on a
clean surface preferably with a rim so small stuff stays in sight.

DJW wrote:
[]
As soon as the drive electronics get power, they start to spin up the disc
(you can sometimes hear this). As soon as the disc is up to speed, most
drive electronics have a self-preservation mechanism which, when the power
is removed, use the physical energy in the rotating drive to help lift and
park the heads.

If it just received a small burst of power, it wouldn't have been able to
store enough rotational energy to park safely, so a head crash seems likely
to have happened. And/or, I suppose it's possible that the surges might have
done for some part of the electronics.

Yes, without the RAM disc, letter C: will either be the hard disc (if the PC
thinks there is one, even if it's not working), or will be unassigned. In
either case, trying to access C: will result in some form of error.

Well, the adaptor leads really are cheap (if you don't let someone rip you
off).

Well, that's why people have been suggesting you use an adaptor just to give
the drive a final check in another computer.

Can't say for laptops, but in desktops, it (a) keeps the clock going when
the power is off, and (b) keeps CMOS settings - such as number of cylinders
and heads the hard drive has, which order to use the graphics cards in, and
so on. Yes, if the CMOS forgets this, the PC could try to access the drive
with the wrong parameters, which wouldn't work (or worse, could corrupt the
data on the drive, though I don't think physically damage it). However, the
manufacturer's own self-booting software you've tried would I think try to
access the IDE controller directly (assuming you told it which model of
drive), so I don't think this _is_ the problem here.

_Some_ motherboards these days use flash memory to hold the BIOS settings,
though I think it's unlikely for a machine of Windows 98 vintage (assuming
it is). Yes, even on desktop motherboards they're a "coin cell" - usually a
CR2032 (which is quite a large diameter; they're becoming popular for very
small remote controls too, like the ones you get with portable DVD players
and the like, though they sometimes use the CR2025, which is about the same
diameter but thinner). I don't know for the average laptop, I'm afraid,
though I imagine they still do use such a cell - though possibly soldered
in, which would be a pain.

Do try the drive with an adaptor (note it will need to connect to both the
IDE cable and the power cable), or in another laptop. Ask around to see if
you can borrow the adaptor: most people who have them don't use them all the
time. (I'd lend you mine, but I suspect we're on different continents, and
you'd have to be near enough to collect it anyway - posting would cost more
than the adaptor did.)

Another option would be to try the suspect drive in some sort of USB
setting: either a posh swanky USB case, or the cheap open
power-supply-and-USB-to-IDE-cable thing. (I got my one of those for five
pounds at a computer show a year or two ago. Obviously, make sure it has the
laptop-type connector - the one I've got has both sorts on opposite sides of
a plug.) I wouldn't really recommend this option, though, as if it still
doesn't work, you're not so sure what it is that isn't working (unless you
have another laptop drive handy to check the interface with).
--
J. P. Gilliver | Tel. +44 1634 203298

Essex home for sale, £59,950: see http://www.soft255.demon.co.uk/home/

"DJW" <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:b13d291a-0f17-4a76-af8d-30e011cc7f19@p25g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...

I suggested the adaptor *only* as a way of retrieving any data you need...
I think they cost about $3 or so. It would not be a major expense.

On Feb 29, 2:38 pm, "philo" <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:
I will think about the adapptor what is it called? Also could I spread
the problem to the other (desktop ) computer?

I wrote Hitachi about the error message and got this reply with the
0x75 error there isn't much more that can happen with that hard drive.
If the hard drive was in the process of booting up and the power was
cut it could have caused issues with the hard drive with the read/
write head. It could have also cause a power corruption error."
Well that's a new one for me. So I guess they are saying give up
getting the drive to work! I guess that the head was not allowed to
park or something like that and now it's had it? Any way I was hoping
I would get some advice on how to fix it by a firmware update or
sending the drive back to them to have them work some magic. I will
replace the drive but my worry is that it was not the hard drive but
the computer in some way as in the IDE controller was damaged and a
new hard drive might have the same problem. Any thoughts from you if
that could be possible.

cleaned it up a bit
Not likely
http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/sit...b11f0aac4f0a0/
download the file and try to re-install the disk. If you controller is
gone you can't open a floppy either.

Good luck

"DJW" <ddwr@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e0998004-464f-48c0-a4ac-033597fa20a6@60g2000hsy.googlegroups.com...
On Feb 28, 5:36 pm, "philo" <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:


is that the Hitachi utility reported FAILURE CODE 0x75

If you got a SMART error, then the drive is simply bad...
not likely there would be any other problems with the machine.
It's rare enough for a power loss to cause any physical damage...
my guess is that the drive was probably about to fail anyway


Here is a link to that adaptor I mentioned

http://www.cjcps.com/cables-laptop-a...-10015524.html


I use mine from time to time and it's easy to do.

I was wrong about the price...it's $6 (but still no fortune)
but maybe if you google a bit you can find a cheaper one...
but it's your best chance for recovering any data on your old drive.
Hopefully you can retrieve it all

On Mar 1, 1:06 pm, "philo" <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:

On 28 Feb, 18:33, DJW <d...@hotmail.com> wrote:
Power failures or cycling to all HDD media is a major issue in causing
data loss and HDD damage.
The head stack assembly can impact on to the surface(s) of the media
thus causing damage to sector(s) which is probably what has happend
here this in turn has affected the logical integrity of the file
system and your inability to access your user data area.
Heat realted issues and power cycling are amongst the highest
premature failure of HDD media without doubt with damaged firmware
also causing problems.
Never work directly on the media somehow you must hook the media to a
stable system either via a USB caddy or or adapter you then must
adjust set the registry to disable writing enable to the media then
you must clone the the media from LBA0 to the end to a another
relaible HDD of the same capacity or greater.
If the media is not detected via the BIOS then you will have to work
much harder as either there are SMART issues or damage to the
firmware.
If you can copy all the data to another HDD then install that as a
secondary and do an intensive scan with that using some decent
software.

I hope this helps you.

All the best.