Help me recover from a dead deathstar!

[Steve]

I have a SCSI drive with XP on it - my IBM IDE 60GXP Deskstar contains a boot partition which in turn loads windows from it.

The Deathstar (aka Desktar) has just gone most of the way south - one of the heads has practically given in to the warm weather.

Now, is there any way to change the bootloader over to the SCSI disk - I know it can be done at XP install, but I don't really fancy reinstalling.

Otherwise I'm going to use acronis true image to get the boot data off the drive... if I can.

Any suggestions PLEASE... I fear I'm running out of time as this drive hasn't got long left!

Cheers,
Kez

PS - I'm glad I don't keep all my eggs in one basket, my mp3's and all data are safe - but this is a major inconvenience if the thing goes down completely.

[directhex]

is the scsi controller supported out of the box by xp? you can try booting the cd, get to the recovery console, and type fixmbr - you might get lucky

[Steve]

is the scsi controller supported out of the box by xp? you can try booting the cd, get to the recovery console, and type fixmbr - you might get lucky

That'll fix the wrong mbr, lol.

Thanks though.

The H: drive (second partition on the disk) is the problem. It's my mp3's, which are backed up. When it tries to mount it things grind to a near standstill - but I'm booted now as the drive seems to handle errors reasonably well. It may be bad sectors in the partition table and that's all - we'll see in a while.

[Steve]

Well, the system is now running OK with a few bad sectors.

However I ran Seagate's online test and the long DST reported a SMART failure.

I burnt IBM/Hitachi's disk tester to CD and ran it. It reported bad sectors and it wanted to repair them - so I told it to. It then came back with a device failure. I've submitted that to the RMA page and it has granted me and RMA, so I'm sending it back.

I can't believe it's still under warranty - it came with 3 years! Must have got it just before company's got stingy with drive warranties.

Anyway, hats off to IBM's disk testing tool as it's very informative, and the error codes can be used to validate an RMA request...

[GAteKeeper]

Did you try freezing it?

I am just praying my 46Gb 75GXP Deathstar doesn't go titsup.com, its getting on for 3 years old now.

GateKeeper

[Steve]

Did you try freezing it?

I am just praying my 46Gb 75GXP Deathstar doesn't go titsup.com, its getting on for 3 years old now.

GateKeeper

It works (although faulty) - so no need. That's only for recovering data, and WILL kill the drive, while resurrecting it for about half an hour.