thanks...once I have booted on the alternate drive...control panel cant recog the other drive...as a secondary one.. do I need a particular selection with my jumpers at the back...or does it not matter?

Seems odd that I need to still press f1 even with the disk that does boot it into Windows...and SATA primary and secondary drives still not recognised...thus the F1 button needed

foale,

I would've thought that it would be easier to put the dodgy drive into a good machine that boots rather than to put a different primary drive into the faulty machine.

foale

Try using disk manager

See my post 6223 -

On XP Start Button - Control Panel - Administrative tools - Computer Management. Then click on Disk management.

Control panel has to be in Classic View for the above to work but there are several alternative ways to get there. You must be logged in with Administrator rights.

Be careful.

Hilary is or course right about sing a different computer if you have one.

Anothe good way is to take the disk out and use an IDE/SATA to USB adaptor (40 from Maplins).

Hils good idea...with try dodgy one on here this arvo....


Have a Maplins down the road...
what does that do..Optimist

Foale

It will allow you to connect a hard drive to the USB port on any compuer. Works the same as an external hard drive but without the casing.

This is the model you need it will connect to SATA, IDE and Notebook drives. It is listed ad 25 but they also list one without the SATA connection for 40. I think they have the prices mixed up they tried to charge me 40 for mine. Print the page off and take it with you.

Foale,

Can I also suggest that you look on eBay. I presume these little goodies are what you need, in which case they're a tenner delivered.

Well spotted Hilary those do the same job

someone suggested a caddy..presumably not golf

someone suggested a caddy..presumably not golf

foale

The caddy will do more or less the same thing but it is really intended to be used as a regular external drive.

If you want to just mount a disk for repair or cloning then us have to take it apart and insert the disk. Most units will only take one sort of disk. With a cable adaptor you just plug the cable in and leave the disk on the desk. They will also cate for 3 different drives SATA - Standard IDE Notebook IDE.

Another SATA problem... any ideas?

A couple of days ago I used XP disk management to add my SATA disk, formatted as NTFS. It worked fine. I copied a load of files onto it. They copied successfully. When I restarted my PC the next day, chkdsk ran on the SATA disk and now windows won't let me access the files on it saying "the device is not ready". I suspect the data is fine on there, but the drive index (is there such a thing?) has corrupted. chkdsk said something about a system volume information problem.

How do I get the data off the disk?

VM

Can you give a bit more info?

Why did chkdsk run?
Did the coputer shut down normally?
Can you see the drive in device manager and disk manager?

chkdsk just ran during startup of the PC saying it had noticed some inconsistencies (or something along those lines). Everything shut down normally.

I can see the disk and even the folders in windows explorer, but when I try to view the individual files in those folders, it says "the device is not ready".

I can't see the disk in disk manager, but can in device manager.

Also, Windows occasionally complains that it was unable to write to the s:\$Mft file (s is my sata drive letter). Whether this is the cause of my problem or a symptom, I'm not sure.

One thing that occurs to me, have you got Win XP SP2 installed? Pre SP2 systems will not work with large hard drives.

If you can't see it in Disk Manager, then that is your problem. Start by removing the drive, reboot and check that Disk Manager can see only what is installed.

Then shutdown, reconnect the disk and run Disk Manager again. If you can get to the stage of being able to see the disk again, try running chkdsk /f to check everything.

However, if I had a new disk that had played up like that, at the very least I would reformat it and start again and I may run a nuke program to erase it and send it back.

I know that the only types of disk are ones that have failed and ones that haven't failed yet, but the former are not worth havig.

Hopefully this will work too

Got very distracted today...back on case re HD tomorrow...

Optimist..agree yours the way to go...

foale

That one is not as good because it doesn't do SATA drives

Thanks for the assistance.

A bit of progress from my fiddling around... the disk now shows in explorer and i can navigate around *most* of it. It also shows as healthy in disk management.

But... while I've managed to grab 90% of my data off the disk, there are still some folders which cannot be opened. I get the error: "the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable".

Opt,

Got that Samsung Q1 Ultra.

Bought it from the guys in Battersea who sold me my Asus - and who deserve the business as the Asus has proved splendid.

Interesting that it does not come with an external CD drive but instead with a USB Data Cable. On the cable is a big bulge that must contain the software for Superlink.exe. This is a type of remote explorer that enables you to see the Samsung drives on my Asus and vice versa. It's a good way to transfer third party source software.

However, it does not seem to do anything other than copy and paste and I guess that if I can get that Remote Control to work between the two machines I'll be able to install the software on the Samsung using the keyboard and mouse on the Asus.

Can I do that by simply connecting the two machines with a normal USB cable? Or do I need some other form of link?

TP

Since a recent firefox update, 2.0.0.8 on my laptop Java (6u3) runs fine on my windows 2000 computer; but on Vista ultimate 32 laptop does not work on firefox.

I've checked Java enabled in firefox is fine, but when I visit Java-tester it is 'not there' in firefox, yet my computer insists all is fine.

I went to 'geek' site and uninstalled then reinstalled Java offline. Still no joy.

Wits end, spent hours over last week going round in circles, especially at Java FAQ site, which keeps taking me back over same ground!

Anyone????

VM

Have you got a copy of the other data that you can't access?

If you have then I would suggest formatting the disk and starting again or even nuking it and sending it back as it will be difficult to have faith in it.

If you need the data, then there are programs that will try to recover the data but they are time consuming and complicated. I bought one a couple of years ago for 30 and recovered someones C: Drive that had been formatted. Most good recovery programs can also take an image of the disk so that you can work on the image without further wearing out a failing drive, but you need massive amounts of disk space.

What is chkdsk reporting? You could try running it again or you could boot into the recovery console and run chkdsk from there. The recovery console seems to have a better version of chkdsk and the syntax is different so run it first with the /? option. Microsoft have a good article to start with here. Be careful it has the potential to do serious damage.