[mr.karmalicious]

Jajajaja.

I've a huge black belt test today. I had an essay that I had to write saved on my computer, and I need it in a few hours. This morning, I went to boot it. Strangely, it seemed that half of the stuff on the screen was in a darkish red color instead of the usual white (same black background, though). Grub (linux dual-booter) then loaded, and ecery other letter was red, and the rest were white. I choe to boot into Windows, because that's the partition the essay is on. When I tried that, I got a black screen, and then nothing. Ctrl+Alt+Dlt wasn't doing anything, so I held down the power button. I heard the little "Windows shutting down" tone, and it turned off. I tried to boot again. No video. Some sort of error-code beep. I open up my case, remove the little battery, and remove the BIOS-memory-reset jumper dealies for about a minute and a half. WHen I rebooted then, I had the same result. I then unplugged the IDE cable from my HDD, and took out my video card and put it back. Now, it doesn't even make the error-code beep, but I still get no video, no sound, and no response from the mouse (it's optical, so the light gets brighter when you move it... this isn't happening).

My test is in three hours, and I've no idea what to do. Any help would be (very) greatly appreciated.

 

[episiarch]

Obviously you're not uncomfortable dealing with hardware, so I would suggest either of the following:

1. If you have a pretty good electronics superstore nearby, go and get an external USB HDD drive enclosure. Take the disk from your computer, mount it in the enclosure, and go find some other computer to connect it to. Plug it in, find your essay on it and do whatever you need to do.

2. If you have a friend who trusts you enough to let you inside his/her computer, take the disk from your computer and mount it in their computer as a second drive, that is, attached to a spare IDE connector. Assuming your disk is IDE rather than SATA, you will first have to change the jumpers on your drive from Master to Slave (there's usually a diagram on the disk label showing how to do this). If your drive is set to Cable Select rather than Master or Slave, you won't need to do this. Then boot your friend's computer, find your essay, and do whatever you need to do.

Either way, the idea is to get your essay today and put off actually repairing your system until you have more time to spend on it. (Or you could say, the idea is to separate the problem of retrieving the data from your drive from the problem of being able to boot from your drive in your system.)

Before you do attempt real repairs to your system, I would recommend using the above techniques to copy all of your important files to some other medium so that if your repair efforts go bad, you don't lose all your files. Personally, I'd buy a new drive, clone the old drive onto it, and make all repair attempts with the clone installed rather than the original. But if you don't want to spend that kind of money, at least grab copies of your most important files before attempting real repairs.

Good luck!

Edit: duhhh, obviously you have access to a second computer, you're posting on Head-Fi. Great! Now all you need is one of the above two ways to attach your old disk to that second computer.

 

[mr.karmalicious]

Hmmm... good advice, but it didn't work. I just pulled my drive out and connected it as slave to the IDE cable on this computer. WIndows said it was updating the hardware database on boot, but my drive wasn't there when I checked...

 

[Firam]

I second what episiarch said. Pull out your drive and stick it in a second computer. You can fix the problem later, because looks like it might involve a format.

 

[Firam]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr.karmalicious Hmmm... good advice, but it didn't work. I just pulled my drive out and connected it as slave to the IDE cable on this computer. WIndows said it was updating the hardware database on boot, but my drive wasn't there when I checked...

Did the drive show up in the BIOS?

 

[asmox]

Have you tried booting into the Linux partition?

Do you get a normal display if you boot from a CD? A floppy?

Do you happen to remember how many beeps were in that error code?

 

[digitalmind]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr.karmalicious Hmmm... good advice, but it didn't work. I just pulled my drive out and connected it as slave to the IDE cable on this computer. WIndows said it was updating the hardware database on boot, but my drive wasn't there when I checked...

Did you make sure you have the jumpers set correct (One master, the other slave/secondary)?

This problem doesn't sound like a broken HD, more like a motherboard/video problem.

 

[episiarch]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr.karmalicious my drive wasn't there when I checked...

Sorry, it's probably now too late for your deadline, but here's the next step.

On the computer your drive's attached to but not showing up on (assuming it's a WinXP machine), right-click on My Computer, choose Manage, then choose Disk Management. See if the disk shows up there.

If the disk does show up there but doesn't appear in Windows Explorer, you probably have a drive-letter conflict. In Disk Management, right-click on the disk and choose Drive Letter and Paths and set the disk to an unused drive letter.

 

[jnev]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr.karmalicious Hmmm... good advice, but it didn't work. I just pulled my drive out and connected it as slave to the IDE cable on this computer. WIndows said it was updating the hardware database on boot, but my drive wasn't there when I checked...

try booting knoppix or some other livecd and seeing if that'll work.