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Trouble with a Hard Drive

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The hard drive on my computer seems to have died. It will not boot any longer.

I have tried to use the Computer setup disks to get into the cmos and they freeze up.

I am going to try and install a new harddrive tonight, but am wondering about a couple things.

Is the cmos in the harddrive or is that a motherboard thing?

Is there a way to reset all setting on the computer so that I will be starting fresh?

Any other good advice on what i can do will also be much appreciated.thanks

Travis

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Trouble with a Hard Drive

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The cmos is on the motherboard. You can’t access cmos by using setup disks, you usually press delete or F1 when the computer is booting.

Do that. You may have lost cmos setting due to a dead battery. Under basic settings, look to see if you floppy and hard drives are recognized. If not, follow on screen instructions to reset. Depending on your cmos, the main menu may have “auto detect hard drive”. If so, do that.

If cmos is OK, can you boot at all from floppy? Not clear from your message.

If yes, type C: and enter. Do you get a C: prompt? Then your drive is there, something other than a dead drive is the problem.
If no, then it’s the drive or possibly the hdd controller.

If you can’t even boot from floppy, something else is wrong. Maybe be disk controllers, motherboard.

Trouble with a Hard Drive

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Trouble with a Hard Drive

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Well, there is one exception I know that keep the Bios information on the disk: Compaq computers. All Compaqs I know will have a small partition 10 to 15 MB on the disk, and that’s where the Bios handler software is. If that’s is not your case, it will normally be on the board. Have you tried to boot your computer using a simple Win98 Startup disk? If you don’t have one, download it from http://www.bootdisk.com/
boot from the disk and run a fdisk. If you’re sucessfully access the program andselect 4 and see the partition information, more likely your disk is good. Look at the date your disk was manufactured, most disks carry a 3 years warranty, even the shipping is paid by the mfr.

Good luck!

Trouble with a Hard Drive

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Trouble with a Hard Drive

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Not being able to boot from your hard disk doesn’t necessarily mean it is dead. You may just have lost the settings in your CMOS. Before anything else, I would try to boot the computer from a floppy and enter the CMOS to check out the settings. If your battery is old and has died, it may have lost your HD settings which may be why it won’t boot. If that is the case, replacing the HD won’t solve your problem.

If the HD is dead, you CAN reset the settings but be very careful. Some older computers don’t have autodetect in the CMOS and if you put in incorrect settings for your HD, you can cause permanent damage to it.

clover

Trouble with a Hard Drive

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Trouble with a Hard Drive

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Travis, I have recently had this problem and TechRepublic’s 200 ways to reapair a HD helped. Your HD is probably dying or dead.
Try the “freezer” method outlined in the article. Make sure that if there is data on the drive that you need that you have a good HD set as slave or use you IDE1 port and make it a Master….What ever, keep in mind that this will probably be a one shot deal. Be prepared to get all the data in one shot!
sselder@konnect.net

Trouble with a Hard Drive

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