Quote:
Originally Posted by newbie
I have a HP m370uk media desktop (Windows Media Centre) and it has just started playing up when you try to boot it. It shows the "HP Invent" blue screen, then the screen goes black and the cursor sits flashing away in the top left corner of the screen. If I switch off & on again a number of times, it eventually boots and eveyrthing appears to be OK (until you try and boot again).
Do you think this sounds like a disk problem and if so, would something like Symantec's Ghost package do a complete image copy of the drive, including the hidden partition and any disk tattoo that may be used on the HP's?
If not, can you suggest anything else that will allow me to salvage the complete contents of my disk.
Thanks.
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iv had a few drives do exactly that recently, the cause can be several things, non of them good.
the fact you can at the moment power off and back on and eventually get it up is a life saver as it were if you act quickly.
if your drive is click and clunking , that points to bad blocks, usually at the begining but not always.
another bad drive i had, was the pata pins were coming loose and nearly snapped ( due to being pulled off and on several machines over time) and that is now still working as i dont pull the drive end cable off it anymore after i did a temp repair and its now in the freeNAS machines as a temp store.
the tools i use as a life saver sometimes are ,
drive image pro,
partition magic.
the one app everyone should buy as a true saver for checking your older drives is
HDD Regenerator
and when i say that i really mean it, its not fast even on a current machine, but it will find and mostly fix any bad blocks that are clunking and its dos based, you can make a self booting floppy or cd to run it, but you will not be sorry you payed for this app.
you really most buy HD regenerator at some point.
if your problem isnt bad blocks (after running HD regenerator, you will know), its going to be the drive logic failing probably, and in which case you need to grab yourself a new drive, put it on the chain, and use drive image pro to clone the old drive to that new hd while its still functioning ASAP.
you can then use partiition magic to make and resize your partitions as you please and not loose your data there, never assume it wont go wrong though, so have/make a backup anyway.
using partition magic,i usually make a standard smallish drive C for the booting, and a drive D partition for all data and the program files dir etc, if theres more than one drive permanenty installed i move the virtual memory binary file to that seperate drive to keep the drive heads access far lower on the c drive and so decrease the potential of bad blocks forming longer term.