Fixing a hard drive.

Ok, I'm hoping someone here might be able to help with a problem I'm having.

I have a hard drive here, a laptop sized IDE one. It's a part of a machine that my father is currently trying to fix, not a PC, but connects to a motherboard for a centrifuge or something.

Recently, that machine started giving a no operating system message. Dad took the hard drive out of the machine and has given it to me to look at.

I've attached the Hard drive to my PC via usb, it recognises it and opens it up. I've run CHKDSK on both of the drives partitions and both say no problems.

When I try booting up via this hard drive, I just get an error message that vanishes too quickly, and then a blue screen.

I assume something happened to the operating system on the hard drive, can anyone offer any advice to how I should tackle this?

Thanks

 

Assuming the centrifuge isn't a uranium enrichment centrifuge and your dad isn't ahmadinejad there's a couple of things you can try:-D Pay no attention I'm just having some fun

Post the make and model of the drive, post the make and model of the computer your tryna fix plus the operating system.

Download the diagnostic utilities from the manufacturer of the drive's website then run them to find the current condition of the drive and run all the diagnostic utilities.

When you say it fails to boot do you mean in your computer or the original? A drive with an OS from another computer usually won't boot, if it's in the original computer and it passes the drive health tests then you need to assume the OS has become corrupt and work from there, start at safe mode "assuming modern windows" then work forward.

Make sure there or no other disk's or drives connected- follow this assuming it's xp, I've assumed xp due to older industry related pc's usually using it.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-things-you-can-do-when-windows-xp-wont-boot/6031733

 

Before doing anything else can you contact the manufacturer to see if they have support options, you can break equipment unrepairable by modifying stuff with a pc if not careful, if you can't get support then ricky has solid advice, but one of my friends managed to mess up a 22,00 video live switcher by thinking oh its a normal hard drive i can clone it and upgrade to a bigger drive.

 

Thanks a lot for the advice chaps.

Rikky, as you mentioned. I went to the website of the manufacturer of the drive and downloaded some recovery tools for it. After running those and chkdsk etc, it determined that nothing was wrong with the drive itself, no bad sectors or anything and was allowing to recover the data on the drive if I wanted to.

I removed a hard drive from an old laptop and connected the faulty one to it via usb. Trying to boot the drive up, I would get a BOOT.INI not found or some such message, it would flash too quickly for me to get it, then would blue screen.

Assuming it was the operating system, I found a program called Wondershare Liveboot 2012. Which I used to run several scans, and replacing of boot files and the like, even to run a system recovery which would fail and tell me to send a report. From doing all this though. when attempting to boot the hard drive up, I would still get the BOOT.INI message, but it would not immediately blue screen like it was, it would go to the windows xp loading screen...then blue screen!

So thats where I'm at with it right now.

Any idea or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Oh, and it sounds like a simple fix, have the company that supply these machines to just send out a new hard drive right? unfortunately not. They don't supply new hard drives, they force you to buy a whole new machine at a £8000 cost!

 

As this appears to be running XP, I would suggest that you try and start in safe mode. To get here, just before the XP startup screen press F8 repeatedly. this should give you a menu wherein you can choose startup options. For now go for safe mode (without networking or anything else) and watch the startup. There should be a continuously updating list of every file XP is loading as it loads them shown, and what we are looking for is the last one before the blue screen. If you can get the name of it please post back.