Rhetorical question:
Why is it always the day you've decided to do a complete backup that your hard disk fails?
Yesterday, every time I'd power on my computer, after a very short period of time (before even reaching the point it could start booting the OS) the system would lock up solid. After a day of switching out components and stripping the system down, I proved conclusively that the motherboard was dead. I remember thinking at the time, "well, at least the hard disks weren't the problem." I had two disks in the system to act as a crude backup - I manually copied anything remotely important from the first disk over to the second disk. Not a perfect backup method (I know at least one copy of the data should be physically detached from the others, and preferably physically separated by a distance proportional to the importance of the data) but it was better than nothing. The odds of _both_ disks dying simultaneously seemed sufficiently low.
However, having now moved both disks over to another system, I can't get this computer to work with them. I'm beginning to think the power supply in the original computer did something awful to the system - and that it didn't just kill the motherboard. The BIOS on this system is able to see these disks when I go into the Automatic IDE Hard Disk Detection section, but when the system boots up, they aren't seen at all and I get an HDD failure. Likewise, if I configure the BIOS to just auto-detect the drives on startup, they aren't seen at all.
What could I be doing wrong? How often does a drive fail in such a way that the IDE Hard Disk Detection function in the BIOS will see them, but then fail to do so during the boot process?
4 months of work on two hard disks, gone. This really, really sucks.
I wish I could find a job ... then maybe I could afford to get a RAID array and a decent CDRW drive.
Why is it always the day you've decided to do a complete backup that your hard disk fails?
Yesterday, every time I'd power on my computer, after a very short period of time (before even reaching the point it could start booting the OS) the system would lock up solid. After a day of switching out components and stripping the system down, I proved conclusively that the motherboard was dead. I remember thinking at the time, "well, at least the hard disks weren't the problem." I had two disks in the system to act as a crude backup - I manually copied anything remotely important from the first disk over to the second disk. Not a perfect backup method (I know at least one copy of the data should be physically detached from the others, and preferably physically separated by a distance proportional to the importance of the data) but it was better than nothing. The odds of _both_ disks dying simultaneously seemed sufficiently low.
However, having now moved both disks over to another system, I can't get this computer to work with them. I'm beginning to think the power supply in the original computer did something awful to the system - and that it didn't just kill the motherboard. The BIOS on this system is able to see these disks when I go into the Automatic IDE Hard Disk Detection section, but when the system boots up, they aren't seen at all and I get an HDD failure. Likewise, if I configure the BIOS to just auto-detect the drives on startup, they aren't seen at all.
What could I be doing wrong? How often does a drive fail in such a way that the IDE Hard Disk Detection function in the BIOS will see them, but then fail to do so during the boot process?
4 months of work on two hard disks, gone. This really, really sucks.
I wish I could find a job ... then maybe I could afford to get a RAID array and a decent CDRW drive.