Hard drive seems ruined

During the week of Katrina, my roof leaked under the heavy rains and soaked my computer. I took off the cover and let it dry out. However, when I tried to get it to boot up, it would get on the Microsoft XP screen and freeze. I took it to a technician who checked out all the boards and said they were fine. He said my hard drive must have taken an electrical "hit" because he put it in a working computer and it would not work. He seems to think the plates are still good. What do I do now? I know it will be expensive to send to a hard drive retrieval service on the Internet.

Thank you for any suggestions you may have.
Susan

 

While I don't wish to dispute your technician's diagnosis, it would seem that your hard drive is actually working to some degree or XP wouldn't begin its boot process. As for it not working in another system, that is understandable, as your hard drive would have the drivers for your system loaded, not the donor computer.

Your problem could be something as simple as system file corruption, usually remedied by going to a command prompt and typing sfc /scannow. This could require you to have an XP cd and not a restore disk.

I'm sure that other members will provide their thoughts on this also, and please wait for others responses before taking my advice. I find it strange that your motherboard and PCI cards survived an "electrical hit" , but it got your hard drive!

 

While I don't like to argue with a professional either, I don't think he gave you a lot of information -- either that, or you haven't passed it on to us.

As Novice and ibbonkers point out, the hard drive obviously isn't completely toasted if you can get as far as the Windows splash screen. (I'm assuming that you were booting from the damaged(?) drive.) So it would be helpful to know what the drive can and can't do. For instance:

• can the drive be accessed in a system booted from another drive? If so:
• does Windows ScanDisk run without error messages? (Novice's suggestion tests for the same problems.)
• what were the results of a surface scan?
• what were the results of running the manufacturer's diagnostics on the drive? (You can usually get diagnostics software from the drive manufacturer's website without cost.)

If your techie can't answer those questions, I don't think he tested the drive thoroughly enough. And I have known techies to be less than thorough on occasion -- they're human, like the rest of us. My office once owned a stack of Compaq LTE20/386 laptops that had rather flaky power switches. They started dying; the techie diagnosed "faulty power switch", and replacement of the power switch meant replacing the mobo at $500 per. The office chose not to spend the money, and let me take them home to see what I could do. The techie was wrong. I put 9 of the 12 back in service by replacing the CMOS backup battery (at $4.95 each), and cannibalized two for parts to deal with the flaky power switches and cracked cases.

 

Probably -- though Win98 is less sensitive to issues of that kind. Win98 might run where XP bombed out.

It'll depend on what hardware didn't have drivers loaded for it in the machine that got the transplanted drive.