I restarted my PC...and it won't come back on.

If you reformat and your hard drive is physically bad, it won't do anything except maybe buy you some time. You need to get a boot disk and run hard drive/RAM tests. It's seriously not hard. If either of them test bad then you can get a replacement.

Taking your PC to a repair shop is.. kind of dumb. If you have the money to spend and don't care about learning the process behind backing up your files (in case this happens again), by all means do that. You WILL get charged a premium; especially for the backup.

I never thought about a live Windows XP CD, but that might be easier to use for someone who doesn't appear to be a "computer guy." Illegal, yes, but you stand more of a chance of successfully backing up your files.

@Alchy: Just for clarification, those drives weren't related in any way. Those marks are from drives we pulled from different laptops from different manufacturers of different time frames. It could just be that they're the most common drive that comes through, because we have some pretty computer-illiterate folk here. Many of the hard drive failures come from people who DROP their computer while it's turned on. On top of that, some of them get mad when you tell them you can't recover their data because the platter is ruined. The joys of computer repair..

 

Beat me to it. :clap:

 

Damn that sucks man... I have a memtest86+ CD and I could easily burn you a live Linux CD, but the problem is (as you said) I'm not going home until November. I'm sure you want your PC before then too. If you want, you could try burning those things yourself (if you need me to send you some links to where you would get those, I can), and then you could call me up and I could try to guide you through the process on the phone. If you want to do that, just send me a PM and I will outline most of the details for you there.

Either way, good luck man.

 

I know it well. "What do you mean you can't recover the data that I should've been storing on my network drive and didn't ever bother to back up? What kind of computer technician are you? Go find someone who can fix this."

When I come up against that I can't help but love the look on their faces when I tell them how much clean-room HDD data recovery costs. Per file.

@ Twimfy/Graciano - Casual would've been just as fucked if this HDD died in a Mac. Save the Apple evangelism for a thread where it's actually relevant.

 

In that case. Yes, download Ubuntu Live CD. Hook up the HDD you are using now in the old PC into your broken PC while the original is also hooked up. Boot off the live CD. You should be able to access both drives and if you can view files in that 150gig RAPTOR, then you're in luck. Simply copy and paste (don't 'cut').

After that, test the RAM & HDD and send them out for RMA, whichever fails its diagnostics.

At my old job. We charge mac user 40% more on repairs and services even though parts for them are just as cheap as standard PC parts nowadays. We make a fortune off the ignorant ;-).

 

The problem is, my old PC doesn't have SATA ports. I'm pretty sure its IDE only, and it won't come back on either.:banghead: If it did have them, I don't have any spares, and its a small crappy PC so wire management is a pain in the ass.

I'm down to my last way of even posting here, a laptop, and the cable internet goes in and out. Frequently.OH:

 

hard drive failer happened to me 2 weeks ago OH:
It turned out to be the "Master Boot Record" (MBR) was corrupt, so I used Pen Drive Linux(Google it) to get my files, and then reformatted the disk.

I'm guessing you MBR is screwed up, of course people will probably ignore this because im new here...

You can look on Wikipedia for more info about MBR's ;-)

On the issue of the interwebs going in and out on you, I cant help, maybe try contacting your isp.

 

Can you play games on it? No? THEN FUCK IT!

9800GTX+ is a little better....not a ton. It should help though. At least the price difference isn't bad after selling the 8800.

You should get a second hard drive or something so when you reformat you don't lose shit other then Windows. Then you just have to reinstall programs and not games and personal shit.

 

Believe me, I'm getting another HDD just for Windows.

EDIT:

About my internet going in and out, its because its cable, and one single cloud in the sky will take it down.

 

Um...?

 

If it even looks like its going to rain, the net goes down. The cable does anyway. I've called the ISP and some guy will fix it, then when it starts to look like rain it messed up again.:shrug:

 

Uh, are you sure you don't have satellite? Cable internet uses a cable, and satellite uses a satellite. Hence, an overcast could take out satellite, but it doesn't make sense to have a cable connection go out on a cloudy day.

You can get a SATA hard drive enclosure (such as this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066) and use it with any computer as long as it has a USB port. That one is not the cheapest one, just the one with the best rating. We use that one where I work, and they are pretty fucking cool. You could get a cheap one for about $15-20 though.

 

come on dude, who still plays PC games? i mean, am i right or am i right? :icon_bigg

 

I do! Old ones and a few new ones!

 

I'm not going to ignore this because you're new... I'm going to point out you're wrong, though. If the HDD works to the point where it shows Windows is starting to load then it's not a screwed MBR. It's a bunch of bad sectors on the disk/other hardware failure, or it's a problem with Windows.

 

Oops, forgot about that, it just sounded similar to what happened to my laptop so I thought I would through the idea out there :redface:

 

Hmm, maybe it is Sattelite, however, the company told us they are going to get rid of the sattelite and go through lines. I thought they did this already, I was wondering why they didn't dig up our old sattelite.

I'm guessing people who want to play games with better FPS rates and graphics than the console versions. And the ability to mod the games to be better. Now who's right?:icon_bigg

 

Do you play games on the internet? If so, then you don't have sattelite.

As much as I like playing some games on PC's, I would die if I only had a computer to play, same as a Wii. I like to play a few good newer games once in awhile and I can't fucking stand half the shit coming out on PC. PC will totally pay off when Starcraft 2 and Duke Nukem Forever drop.

Oh yeah, I like adventure games. Those are nice to play on a computer.

I think PC works great for the tards who are adept at playing only one god damn fucking game all the fucking time, i.e. WoW, CS

 

We've got a sattelitte from the same company. Its hard to explain, I'm not sure now which thing gives access to the net or not.

The service guy who came down here said it was our Linksys router acting up. Who knows.

I play TF2 on pretty non laggy speeds and a good FPS, so I dunno. It might be the server, also, some servers are lagtacular.

 

Personally, I'd run HDD regenerator to recover the error. See how fast it goes. It should go fairly fast... if it is something like an increment of 1 every 2 mins, the hard drive has had it. Then run the Vista recovery tool on the CD again. That might fix it.

If it doesn't, get a new hard drive, install windows and put the old one in as a slave. At this point, if you can't access the drive, you're looking at £600+ ($1000+) to recover the data. If you can access it, copy it and, here's the important part, BACK IT UP!

The thing I always found myself saying to customers, such a basic thing but something you wouldn't believe how often it isn't done..... if you have important data, BACK IT UP! It really is simple. Get a CD or DVD, open Nero (or whatever you use), drag the items onto a data CD and burn!

Yes we have all done it, hopefully we learn from our mistake!!