Member Avatar for Michaelp69

Hi All,
Hope I don't sound like too much of a simpleton, but I'm a relative novice.
I have a emachine that had the hard drive die about a year ago, I replaced the old drive and moved it to the slave. this was working fine until last month. At that time, everytime I booted up my machine there would be a series of beeps, and my monitor wold remain blank. But after a couple of tries it would boot. Last week, I booted the machine, and got an error message saying the slave drive was unreadable press F1 to continue. I had another old 40 gig drive and replaced the slave, now everything works fine. When I tried reconnection the first slave to try to retieve data, I got an I/O error.
Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can salvage my data?

Michaelp69

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Chaky
Member Avatar for Chaky

This is a long shot and a slim chance....but You can try:

- changing the IDE cables.
- turning off ALL enhancements (set it to PIO mode)
- turn off HDD block mode
- turn off IDE prefetch mode
- turn off 32 bit transfer
- turn off S.M.A.R.T.
- if there's something I missed, turn it off (NOT the IDE channel, though)


Note: some of these things may not be listed in your BIOS.
If that doesn't do it..... Try it no the different machine. Might just work a little there.

P.S.

I have one HD that is dying last 4 years. It's still kicking. But every now and then it causes a system crush and it wouldn't boot every time. No matter what I do. And it is STILL working, that is, while it is working.

Member Avatar for Michaelp69

Thanks for the tips, I don't think I'll get a chance to try them before the week-end. I'll let you know what happens.

Member Avatar for Chaky

There's one trick I've heard, but it is an even slimmer chance:


Cooling the drive in the freezer might make it work again, until it worms up.

I think that if the freezing the drive would make it work, that heating it up could do the same if the freezing fails.

HDs have mechanism that realigns the heads according to the temperature (material expansion), so if that mechanism failed, you can bring the temperature to it.


As I said, if it works, it would probably be the first.

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