Bad News

Heoga

New member
Bad news I'm afraid.  My hard disk seems to have gone a bit wonky.  I think the boot sector has become damaged which means everything on it is as good as gone.  That includes, amongst other things, all the edits I did to bring the source code up to the orange box base, the coding of the player's shields and the alarm light.

On the bright side, I still have the backed up data from when I changed computer so it's not a complete loss.  That said though, it is going to set me back a few weeks so expect things to be quiet from me for a while.

I still have OBJ files for the models I made and can send them on if anyone fancies a shot at texturing them.

Anyhow, be back shortly I hope...
 
Hey bro... you can give you disk to repairing shop, they will extract needed files from there. Worked with me. Costs not much, so you should be ok. As for codes, I always try to keep backup copies online on my website for example in case my PC fails.

Do not worry too much my friend.
 
Create a new filesystem (FDISK) on a new disk with at least the same capacity with the same location(s). Copy all sectors but the first. Start up your computer and read the files.

If you had more than one partition this is slightly more complex.
 
I might have a suggestion or two, I dont know jack about coding but I'm fairly good with hardware (I should be it's my job :) )

At what point is it breaking? Does windows start to load but then throw up an error? If so what is the error?

Just because a disk is not bootable does not mean the data on it is lost.

Does the computer BIOS detect the disk?

Sometimes if a disk has a faulty controller it may not work in one PC but it might on another (dont really know why but it sometimes does).

Normally if you just plug the disk into another working PC windows will detect the drive and you can just copy your data off.

If you are feeling a little bit more confident of your hardware skills and you can get an identical Hard Disk Drive you cn just swap the controller printed circuit board over, this is actually a lot easier than you would think. From what I understand this is the main way a data recovery centers carries out around 90% of its repairs.

Anyway if you can tell me the exact problem I may be of more help :)
 
I called Samsung and all they could suggest was to send it back and have it replaced.  I got the feeling the tech on the other end of the line knew less about it than I did, but then I normally get that feeling with call centres.

As for what's happening, well, when I boot up the PC the bios recognises the disk is there and attempts to boot from it.  However, when it tries the drive makes a sound quite like the sound a CD makes when it jumps - A whirr-click-whirr-click type sound - and nothing happens, no errors just an eternal pause.  I've tried booting from a boot disk and accessing that way, but again as soon as I try to access the drive the sound starts and the computer just stops and waits.

I don't feel that confident with my hardware skills, and there is not enough valuable data accumulated on the drive in the two months I've had it to risk voiding the warranty. 

I'll try plugging it into the old computer, which I still have around, and see if it can pick it up.  Hopefully I'll get lucky there.  If not, then I'll send it back to Samsung, get the replacement and I've just lost a few weeks code (which I'm confident I recreate easily enough), a few save games, and some videos of Seven Days. 
 
Hmm that sounds like a bad head crash.
I know it from my old hard disks... but somtimes you have luck and not all sectors are damaged, so you can open some folders with another PC which booted from its own hard disk.
So you have to add you HDD or replace a CD drive. But if you already tried it accessing with another PC and it didn't work there won't be a big chance.
Maybe you can try a harddisk tool like scandisk to disable the bad sectors, but in XP times i don't know such a problem.

http://www.floborecovery.us/
http://repair4harddisk.org/
 
dont worry about software based recovery from this type of fault, to be honest software based recovery is only good for un-deleting files etc.. In other words software is useful for fixing a software caused problem ie virus damage or accidental deletion. The data is still there on the disk platters its just not excessable.

I have heard the sound you are describing, and I'd bet money that the controller is damaged. Some time you can get lucky and get it working by using one of those external USB drive cases but most likely the only way to get this drive going to to swap out the controller circuit board, but of course you need and identical drive to borrow the controller from and you don void your warranty in the process (not that they could tell if you swapped it all back).

Since you can easily re do the work its probably not worth the effort :(
 
So, got my replacement hard disk.  But lo and behold, another problem emerged.  The computer would switch itself off after anything from a few seconds to half an hour.  Turns out it was a dodgy power supply that probably caused the failure in the first place.  When I replaced that, the computer was fine.

You live, you learn....
 
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