LG John

Last week my computer came up with an error saying, 'raid not defined' So I went into the bios told it where the hard-drive was and told it to boot from that. As soon as the windows logo comes up it restarts and it loops in that cycle! I tried to get into the recovery (which is a partition on the hd) and it didn't work (rare!). I then loaded up the recovery cd and tried to recover the hd and it wouldn't recognise the c drive at all. It seems to realise there is a 200GB drive there but just won't entertain trying to access anything on it

I know its vague but any thoughts? Going to try and put another working hd with opperating system into it in next few days and if that loads up then I can at least rule out everything except the hd or software on the hd.

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

You need to connect up the HDD in another machine as a slave. If the second machine can't read the drive, then it's borked - which is my guess anyway.


M

lokokkee

Something similar happened to me before. The BIOS will show the HDD, but WinXP will not recognise it. Turns out the partition table is corrupted. If data is not important, then reformating the drive will solve the problem, otherwise, get one of the disk utility programs to salvage data on the HDD first. Still haven't figured out whether it was caused by a virus or a power interruption. I usually have a UPS, but it was sent for repair and there was a power failure while the PC was on. It is unlikely to be the cause thogh as I have two HDDs plus an external USB HDD and all were affected. Really thought that was the end of the world as my backup was on the 2nd HDD drive and with both not readable by WinXP, all my data was gone. Luckily, the disk utility program allowed me to salvage most of the files. Some of the file names were intact, but contained gibberish when salvaged. So now I have another data backup on a DVD as well.
Also, another time, the internet dialup connection was blanked out, so I can't dial out to the AV websites for help, and Norton AV got disabled, requiring a clean reboot. Thought I would save all the documents and settings to my other HDD before the reboot. Upon retransferring back the data, the same thing happened, so whatever caused the problem is stored there in the Norton AV settings files.