[myspoonistoobig]

btw, with the drive out, does the floppy drive work?

No actually, it still claims my floppy disks are unformatted and refuses to format them.

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Not only did it not work, it started making very nasty clacking noises. Methinks the drive is gefukt.

Ouch! I wasn't going to check back this soon, but gee, this wasn't the news I was hoping for! Bummers!

One last shot. If perchance you get the drive to spin up, you might try BartPE and see if it can read it. If you haven't heard of BartPE, it's more or less a Psuedo windows environment off a bootable CD that will boot your computer and enable you to read data on your hard drives. If (BIG IF), Bart can access the drive, you might be able to move data from e: to c or d. Then again, whether or not it will even be able to recognize your e-drive is another question altogether!

Man... now your sound card? Hows your power supply? Checked bios lately to see if your Power forms are ok?

makai

[makai]

Not only did it not work, it started making very nasty clacking noises. Methinks the drive is gefukt.

Ouch! I wasn't going to check back this soon, but gee, this wasn't the news I was hoping for! Bummers!

One last shot. If perchance you get the drive to spin up, you might try BartPE and see if it can read it. If you haven't heard of BartPE, it's more or less a Psuedo windows environment off a bootable CD that will boot your computer and enable you to read data on your hard drives. If (BIG IF), Bart can access the drive, you might be able to move data from e: to c or d. Then again, whether or not it will even be able to recognize your e-drive is another question altogether!

Man... now your sound card? Hows your power supply? Checked bios lately to see if your Power forms are ok?

makai

[myspoonistoobig]

Sound card's working fine now after another reboot.

No idea what was going on there.

The gods of computers must hate me or something

[gerryf]

when was the last time the floppy drive actually worked....could be the other problem brought a failed drive to your attention.

How old were the floppies? Was there anything on them. Floppies are notoriously unreliable.

[myspoonistoobig]

when was the last time the floppy drive actually worked....could be the other problem brought a failed drive to your attention.

How old were the floppies? Was there anything on them.  Floppies are notoriously unreliable.

The last day it worked was...maybe 7/2? It was last week sometime.

My black disk wasn't working, so I pulled out my red one. (I keep three or four trusty disks, but I seldom use floppies anymore since the advent of CD-RW).

It's an IBM external drive (originally for a ThinkPad), USB connector. It's worked wonders and dandies since I've had it. This is the first problem I've had with it.

I'm starting to wonder if my motherboard isn't on the fritz... this just doesn't seem right: hard drive failure, floppy drive failure, sound card acting screwy, all at the same time? No virii or malware? Clean HJT log? Impending motherboard failure is the only thing I can actually foresee. Which means I'd better start saving

[myspoonistoobig]

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that I downloaded a tool called GetDataBack (v2.31 for FAT) and it was able to discern my E: drive (after a couple days rest, it's not making any evil noises anymore). I have a bad sector in my MBR (and acc. to this program, my partition has two slightly different MBRs) and a half dozen or so bad sectors throughout the drive. It can read almost all my files and it seems only a handful are corrupted. It has scanned and indexed them all.

The bad news is that I don't have the money to register it. I'm not about to ask for a serial number to be shared, because that's illegal. So, barring that, do you know how I might be able to access these files, or perhaps repair my MBR without overwriting the files that are there?

I am in serious lack of funds or I'd pay the $50 to register it.

Thanks,
Dave

[makai]

Hey Dave,

Did you have a look at BartPe? Since your drive is now readable by Getdataback, Bartpe may be able to read it too. Cost... 1 cdr disk you'll use to burn Bartpe on.

Link: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I've used it several times to move data on partitioned drives, so it will work for you if it can read your e drive. Read the page and consider plugins if you need them. Bartpe was actually created just for problems like this.


makai

[myspoonistoobig]

Hey thanks, I'll check that out.