RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
With Stefan gone, I'm doing more of my own hard drive diagnostics / data recovery (at least the simpler jobs where the drive is physically intact and the I/O circuitry is functional), so...
I got this Dell Dimension E520 that won't boot (can't find boot volume). Sees the drive, but not the partition.
So I pulled the drive (Samsung OEM SATA) and installed it on another machine, and the partition was gone. Showed up as a raw drive.
I recovered the partition, copied the documents over to the host machine for backup, and then ran a CHKDSK on it. EVERY SINGLE FILE showed an incorrect security ID, which CHKDSK "fixed." I ran some more tests on the drive, and it passed every one.
Then I installed it back into the client's machine and tried to boot it. It booted fine, except that the USB keyboard and mouse didn't work (the machine has no PS/2 ports). I plugged them into different USB ports, and got the error "A USB device attached to this computer has malfunctioned," or something along those lines. Same thing happened with every mouse and keyboard I tried.
I restarted the machine (soft-off with power button), and then started it again; and I noticed that the keyboard wasn't recognized in BIOS, using any of the ports. I cleared the CMOS, and now it won't boot at all because it's asking me to hit F1 or F2, and it doesn't recognize any USB HID devices in BIOS.
So now I'm thinking that this is a hardware I/O problem -- that the chipset (or some other component on the motherboard) has issues that caused both the HIDs not to be recognized and the hard drive corruption, and that the motherboard needs to be replaced.
My question is: Even though the hard drive now checks out OK, if the customer decides to replace the mobo, should I clone the HD to a new one in case some hidden damage was done?
As an aside... I actually picked up the phone to call Stefan and ask him for advice about this today... then I remembered that he was dead. Sigh...
-Rich
I got this Dell Dimension E520 that won't boot (can't find boot volume). Sees the drive, but not the partition.
So I pulled the drive (Samsung OEM SATA) and installed it on another machine, and the partition was gone. Showed up as a raw drive.
I recovered the partition, copied the documents over to the host machine for backup, and then ran a CHKDSK on it. EVERY SINGLE FILE showed an incorrect security ID, which CHKDSK "fixed." I ran some more tests on the drive, and it passed every one.
Then I installed it back into the client's machine and tried to boot it. It booted fine, except that the USB keyboard and mouse didn't work (the machine has no PS/2 ports). I plugged them into different USB ports, and got the error "A USB device attached to this computer has malfunctioned," or something along those lines. Same thing happened with every mouse and keyboard I tried.
I restarted the machine (soft-off with power button), and then started it again; and I noticed that the keyboard wasn't recognized in BIOS, using any of the ports. I cleared the CMOS, and now it won't boot at all because it's asking me to hit F1 or F2, and it doesn't recognize any USB HID devices in BIOS.
So now I'm thinking that this is a hardware I/O problem -- that the chipset (or some other component on the motherboard) has issues that caused both the HIDs not to be recognized and the hard drive corruption, and that the motherboard needs to be replaced.
My question is: Even though the hard drive now checks out OK, if the customer decides to replace the mobo, should I clone the HD to a new one in case some hidden damage was done?
As an aside... I actually picked up the phone to call Stefan and ask him for advice about this today... then I remembered that he was dead. Sigh...
-Rich
