I seem to have acquired a reputation at work for being able to work miracles. In the space of 3 days I’ve picked up 2 dead PC’s from 2 different friends. Both are non-booters, and both quite new.

The first one I’ve ‘fixed’ already – by taking the graphics card out and using the onboard VGA instead. The machine didn’t even POST with the card in, just beeped pathetically. Take the card out, works fine. Why is a different matter, I can’t find any physical damage to it, but it’s a cheap enough item to replace so I’m not going to waste more time on it. The machine now boots. Job done there.

Machine 2 is a slightly different affair. That POST’s fine, but doesn’t go any further. No XP boot screen, no errors, nothing. Just POST, then death.  I grabbed my Windows XP install CD and booted into the Recovery Console and on doing a DIR within the \Windows directory, I got read errors. Uh oh. CHKDSK also shit itself while trying to read the volume. Oh dear oh dear. Hard drive crash.

My friend here didn’t have any backups, and the machine apparently contains thousands of family photos, so losing the data isn’t an option. The disk is in a very bad way as evidenced by SpinRite having been running on it now in my recovery rig for 3 hours and it’s only 2% in. The DynaStat data recovery system has had to attempt to read several  sectors thousands of times before coming to a conclusion, and so far 47 haven’t been able to be recovered at all. I wonder if the heads have physically come into contact with the platters, which is going to be far beyond my ability to fix. Specialist clean room equipment would be needed there, and even then recovery is unlikely. But, SpinRite has recovered hundreds of sectors so far, so even if the machine fails to boot after it is done, I should be able to BartPE it and do a volume backup over the network to recover the majority of the data. I can then burn this to DVDs, hopefully saving his picture collection, if not the hard drive.

It’s a pain in the arse being a geek sometimes, but the joy of getting someone’s invaluable data back? Priceless.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.