Help computer boffins:furious:

[numbnuts]

I switched on my sun gas anaylser this morning which runs on windows xp and it wont go past the black and white screen with the start up options
safe mode
start normally
recent configeration etc any suggestions as i cant get hold of the engineer

[rednotdead]

Try the 'start normally' and see what happens. Did it shut down cleanly last time? If not then its just got its knickers in a twist.

[bigmoose]

I had this problem and it ended up being the HDD self harming. The wife went mental as all the wedding and honeymoon piccys were on the PC. I had to pay someone to retrieve the data.

Appearantly the ATA hard drives are prone to buggering about.

[lockup]

Computer hard drives all fail eventually. ATA drives are cheaper per GB than SCSI but are less reliable. Some ATA drives are more likely to fail than others.

Moral of the story is as always: make a backup!

(The moral is of course useless if disk is already dead. Also, I'm not sure how it applies to Sun Gas Analyzers)

[polus]

Indeed hard disks are a pain in the ass!

I run my disks 24/7.

Over the past few years Ive had:
4x (40,40,60,60GB PATA) IBM hard disks, 1 DOA, 3 failed within a year.
3x (15, 60, 60GB PATA) Maxtors, 2 Failed within a year, the other one is working fine!
1x (120GB PATA) Western Digital, 3 years of abuse and still its running in my sisters computer fine, 4 years on!
4x (3x120GB, 1x 400GB) Seagates - 1 Failed after 9 months the others are going strong, although Im getting werid SMART errors on the 400GB seagate I have :-/

I guess this give you an idea of the importance of backing-up your data! At £30 now for a dual layer dvd writer (4.7 single, 8GB dual) its not that expensive either...

[rameshuk]

bigmoose said:

I had this problem and it ended up being the HDD self harming. The wife went mental as all the wedding and honeymoon piccys were on the PC. I had to pay someone to retrieve the data. Appearantly the ATA hard drives are prone to buggering about.

All hard drives can develop problems.
Imagine something spinning at 5400/7200/10000 RPMs.

Your valuble data is on it.
You have backed up on to a DVD/CD right ?

You could always setup a RAID configuration
Needs 2 hard disks. One mirrors the other.
So data can be easily recovered.

Can also increase performance by about 30% if you add another two (Striping).

Good Luck !

[numbnuts]

looks like i have to reinstall windows and then the anaylser software bl**dy computers i hate them.

[rameshuk]

Not sure what hardware you have but....


You could buy a cheap new hard disk (£40).
Install that as your main drive and put the old hard disk as a secondary drive.

Install Windows on the new one. You can then grab your data off the old one.

Just because windows does not boot does not necessarily mean the data is gone.
(As I've found out a couple of times!)

[polus]

I should mention (prompted by the above post) that before most of those disks I posted died, I managed to put them in my secondary machine and grab most/all of the data back before they dies completly! if the disk hadnt died by then, wiping it 35 times defiently kills them but at least I could be sure on sending it back no one would have any of my details

[JoolzB]

numbnuts said:

I switched on my sun gas anaylser this morning which runs on windows xp and it wont go past the black and white screen with the start up

Was it a cloudy day