Dying System Drive -- What To Do?

[FalTorPan]

My other PC, an HP m8100n, has a nearly dead system drive. I woke up yesterday morning to discover this unpleasant surprise.

Overnight last night I ran Vista's "Startup Recovery" tool. I just woke up to check on the PC's status, and it presented the normal Vista login screen. I entered my password, and the system has frozen. The bottom line is that I suspect that the drive may be hosed.

A friend has suggested that I try a tool called SpinRite. Assuming that I try it and it doesn't work, what are my options? Like many PCs my HP m8100n didn't come with a recovery disk. The recovery data is on a separate partition of the same system drive that's on its way to that PC hardware junkpile in the sky.

Needless to say I'm more than a bit bummed out. On the upside I'm glad that I managed to archive most of my data files.

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions.

 

[FalTorPan]

Lo and behold, I actually had decent technical support experience with HP. This has probably been my only positive experience with tech support from any PC manufacturer.

A new hard drive and a new recovery CD are on the way. With any luck, by the end of this weekend, my PC will be in tip-top shape as it was in... August 2007.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

To double the number of participants in this conversation, I'll give input on Spinrite.



Spinrite has been around since shortly after IBM introduced the PC-AT. Steve Gibson created a great program that did many things that were previously impossible, such as on-the-fly low level formats that kept user data intact.

Alas, Spinrite does have its limitations. It WILL often recover data, mark newly discovered bad spots on a hard drive, and the like.

It will NOT compensate for major hardware failures like bearing failures, controller problems, and things of that nature.

So, if you have data that you haven't made backups of, Spinrite can often revive a disk enough to effect a recovery of the data. That being said, it's on a drive that still has problems, so a migration to a new drive would still be a good idea.

Spinrite is available from www.grc.com

When the new drive comes, burn the bloody recovery disks! LOL

AG

 

[T J]

I had this problem a few months ago with my laptop. In my case I did have the recovery CD and it did nothing at all... piece of crap. I ended having to do a total reformat, lost everything on it, had it all backed up though.