The blog of Matthew A. Smith and Michael Chappell, on topics from A to Z

Argh! A Hard Drive Gone Bad?

by Matthew Smith · December 20th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on an extensive project for my Aunt (there will be more details on that one later) and have been putting my lovely computer through the paces. I must say, the beastly Core2Quad definitely gets work done! I would like two more gigs of ram, but thats for another day…

Last night while I was working away (right after I got done with an episode of House), several programs froze up and I couldn’t get back to the desktop so I restarted the system, to no avail. After poking around for a while, I found the culprit: a two year old 250GB SATA driveĀ  (it’s not my system drive and it didn’t contain the files I was working on, thankfully). Apparently, if Windows can’t read one of the drives (this is one of five hard drives I have connected) during boot, it hangs and gives you a nice black, uninformative screen while it hangs attempting to read the file system from the bad drive.

The heat situation in my computer is rather bad (need more fans), so I’m hoping a little cool down time will allow me to copy the data off the drive. I may have to resort to the freezer method, however. I guess it’s time to buy another hard drive and some fans.

Categories: Technology

2 responses so far »

  • 1 Alex Tatem // Jan 28, 2008 at 5:40 pm

    I actually ran my xbox in a fridge at a steady 15 C for about 2 weeks after breaking the fan when poking around on the inside. true story. I would recommend it if it weren’t for that whole inconvenience/condensation thing, lol.

  • 2 Matthew Smith // Jan 29, 2008 at 12:36 am

    Haha that’s awesome! I didn’t actually run my hard drive in the freezer, but let it get cold then reconnected it to the pc… no luck though. However, this method is successful at times - we’ve done it at the computer store before.

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