From: "Ryan Bowman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2004 8:53 PM > I use my laptop for everything. I have a desktop machine at home > that sits there all day feeling lonely because if it's lucky I use it > once a month for 12 seconds or so. It is mainly used as a home for > data that doesn't fit on my laptop drive, or that I use rarely. > Yesterday I went to use it and it was dead. I tried to start it, and > after several agonizing minutes of waiting for it to detect the hard > drive it gave me the model number properly and said 'Capable, but > Disabled' and it would not move. Trying to go into the bios setup was > unsuccessfull until I unpluged the drive. So, what do I do to > determine if the drive is still good? Or to fix it and make it good? > I have a lot of data stored on there that I'd like to get back. It's > a new-ish drive, < year old I think, rarely used, as I said, and I > hate to admit it, but it's primary partition is NTFS. Any help is as > always, greatly appreciated. >
When you said "waiting for it to detect the hard drive", what are you seeing that lets you know that this is what it is doing? Can you be sure that the message you saw is a BIOS message or is it an OS message? Did the message actually say: Prime Master Ultra S.M.A.R.T. Capable but Disabled or something with "S.M.A.R.T" in it? Can you hear the hard drive spin-up when you turn on the computer? Do you normally leave this computer on? When you went to use it, was it frozen in some manner or were you turning it on for the first time in a while? If it was frozen, did you see any error messages, can you look in your logs and see any? What type of computer is this (compaq, dell, . . . if any), or what brand/model of motherboard does it use? If you do find a diagnostic utility from the drive's manufacturer, be sure that it is not a data destructive utility -they do exist. Matt W. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
