Hard drive about to take a dump.

[AL P]

I think my primary hard drive is about to take a dump. The way I have my junk set up, I have a 10 gig HD at C: that is the boot drive then i have a 120 gig that is at E: that has all my important shit on it.

I usually just leave my computer on all the time, even when not at home. I came home yesterday and I had an error message on the screen that said it couldn't find the primary hard drive. I CTL+ALT+DEL the thing and it went to run the hard drive to re-boot and started making all sorts of clicks and shit and wouldn't boot. It just sat there clicking over and over and over. I then shut the power off for a while and fired it up again and it worked fine. Long story short....I'm now sweating my little 10 gig HD.

Can I just copy all of my windows files onto the E: and then do something in the BIOS to tell it to look there if the C: is not available on start up? Or hell...would it do that automatically if there is nothing at C: or in the floppy? What do I need to do to make sure I have some sort of back up?

[busted90]

Sounds like the drives gone, go to the BIOS and see if it can see the drive my guess is no.
You can replace the 10gig and reinstall the OS and you will be fine, just make sure the new drive is pinned as master and the other is slave.

[ceyko]

If it booted just fine, likely the BIOS will see it most of the time. In this case, anything BIOS is a waste of time.

Just replace the drive and reinstall the OS since you have all your other stuff on another drive.

[AL P]

I don't have a copy of the OS. That's the problem. If I had one I wouldn't have made this thread.

[ceyko]

Image the drive with ghost. Install new drive...and image that drive. Ghost is 40-60 bux at your local retailer.

Just gotta hope no important files are fugged up from the f'ed up drive.

[mikeb]

[QUOTE=ceyko]Image the drive with ghost. Install new drive...and image that drive. Ghost is 40-60 bux at your local retailer.

Just gotta hope no important files are fugged up from the f'ed up drive.[/QUOTE]

Buy two drives when you buy ghost and after the old drive is copied to the new drive use ghost to periodically back up the computer to the other new drive. Image backup is cool because if the drive fails you simply swap in the backup drive, boot up and go without having to fumble around trying to reinstall software.

[AL P]

FYI....

This turned into a problem where my drive would disappear. I would be going along playing a game and my system would freeze up. I'd go out and look at my drives and the 120 gig auxiliary drive would not show up. All my executables from that drive on my desktop would show up as some odd icon because it didn't recognize the file.

I did some research on the internet and found a site that said it could be a problem with voltage from the power supply. I tore my case open and noticed that I had the bigger drive on the end of a two plug, four wire power supply cable. I switched it to be on the first plug of that two plug cable and haven't had a problem since.

[Kenny_Stang]

I would recommend changing out your PS, it's good insurance especially if the current one is acting flaky. A bad PS can take out your motherboard.