[powlaz]

I have a brand new 40GB HDD that appears to have crapped out on me. It was only used for a couple of weeks as a storage drive before grinding to a halt. With the HDD connected (as a slave) the PC will not boot. If I remove it . . . the PC boots.

I wanted to run a diagnostic on the HDD to see what SMART returns (for hoots really) but it poses a good question. How does one run a diagnostic or perform data recovery on a corrupt drive (with no OS) that is so corrupt it prevents the primary drive from booting up????

Very curious. Thanks for the consideration.

Matt

Edited by powlaz, 12 September 2005 - 05:52 PM.

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Hi there

When you say the system won't boot with the drive connected, do you mean it won't load to windows or that it won't even boot to the bios screen?

If it's just windows that won't load, you should be able to boot from a floppy disk with a hard drive diagnostic on it. (download one from the drive's manufacturers website).

If the screen doesn't come up at all, try booting into the bios with just this drive connected & see if the bios detects it correctly.

[Samm]

Hi there

When you say the system won't boot with the drive connected, do you mean it won't load to windows or that it won't even boot to the bios screen?

If it's just windows that won't load, you should be able to boot from a floppy disk with a hard drive diagnostic on it. (download one from the drive's manufacturers website).

If the screen doesn't come up at all, try booting into the bios with just this drive connected & see if the bios detects it correctly.

[powlaz]

Sorry, should've been more specific. On one PC I got an error AND the BSOD that "No Boot Device Can Be Found" --I might've paraphrased a little here On another PC - my Dell- the screen to " Hit f1-Try Again, or f2- Enter Setup" came up. I went into setup and my primary drive was "unknown", as was the slave. Remove the slave drive and my primary drive was once again known. In both cases I never got to load Windows
Samsung's website is not very user friendly. Is there a generic utility such as the one you described or should I scour their site??

Thanks for the reply, btw, I didn't do so well with my last question.

Matt

[Samm]

Here's the link you need for samsungs website. Just select the model number of the drive & it should give you an option to download a DOS based diagnostic.

http://product.samsu...ndex.jsp?eUser=

A Samsung diagnostic tool is preferable to a generic one, as it will be specifically written for your drive. If you don't manage to find one then we can look for a suitable generic one instead.

Can you tell whether the drive is formatted using FAT32 or NTFS?

[powlaz]

Thanks - Drive failed every test. Deader than a doornail. I appreciate the help and education.

Matt

[Samm]

You're welcome