Requiem :(

Hey, guys. After much tweaking and untweaking various probs, my badly behaved computer has recently begun making occasional "clink"-ing noises, presumably towards death. My question for you wise people is this: How do I know what I desperately need to save(to disk) and what to leave out? Being a sentimental fool, I have rescued pix of my dog and son, as well as a version of winsock that I used when upgrading from 95 to 98. I thought I could use windows' backup and save my entire system to put on another hard drive, but it seems a ridiculously high number of disks are required for such an endeavor. Can someone please help? As stated, I am running windows 98, upgraded from 95, and have the upgrade disk, as well as a startup. While it hasn't made the noise today, this random clinking has been going on for a couple of weeks now. Thank you.

 

Thanks for the reply. It's not so much that I have irreplaceable files, I just don't know how this works. Are there aspects of windows I need to keep, since I only have the upgrade, etc? How much of an investment are we talking for Norton ghost? Thanks for your time.
Dani

 

Are the clinking sounds coming from the hard drive itself? If so, this may be a coming up hdd crash.

The following website has some .mp3s that have audio of hard drives that are either dead or failing. If yours sound familiar (does not need to be exact), it may be time to buy a new hdd (hard disk drive).

http://www.head-crash.org/hddcrsh_us.htm

 

go to google

type in

clone maxx

free cloner

 

Thanks. Am going straight to clone maxx from here. Meanwhile, I am a dead man walking and would appreciate further advice. I found 2 hard drives in the attic, A being from my very first computer and very tiny, B from an adequate older machine without printer/usb ports, and C represents my current dying machine. I am a beginner, please bear with me. I currently have A connected to C(the dying one), and am trying to incorporate B as my main hard drive to my computer. Having the old drive attached to both the dying and preferred drive seems somehow to have helped so far. When I hook up hard drive B to my current computer, all I get is a bunch of vertical green lines, whereas it worked fine on the old computer. However, when I plug A into B, on the current machine, it seems I can start in safe mode. I am forced to deduce that this is a conflict with a display adapter or some other video device, which I know nothing about. So far I have saved the driver onto disk to attempt to load in safe mode. If this makes sense to anyone I will be gratefully amazed.
Dani

 

I think we're going to need at least a little information about the hard disks that you have described as A, B, and C. (You'll note that I am referring to the physical units as "disks" -- this is to differentiate them from what your system will see as the C: drive, D: drive, etc. The latter can refer to partitions set up on the disks, or may refer to the entire disk.)

Are they all IDE disks? What are their respective capacities? How old are they? What make and model are they? Are A and B formatted? If so, are they formatted as one partition, or do any of them have more than one partition? Does A or B already have an operating system installed on it? If so, what operating system? What operating system are you using on the C disk?

You say you "plugged A into B". Are you saying that you connected both A and B disks to the same IDE ribbon cable? If so, was that cable connected to the computer's primary IDE channel, or to the secondary channel? Did you set the master/slave jumpers on the two hard disks appropriately?

As a general rule: Unless you tell your system otherwise (and sometimes you can't), your system will boot from the first primary partition on the master disk on the primary IDE channel, and will label that partition as the C: drive. If that partition does not contain an operating system, or is not marked "active", you will not be able to boot from that disk.

You say, "When I hook up hard drive B to my current computer, ...". I assume that you set it up as the master disk on the primary IDE channel and jumpered it as master or sole disk. What operating system is on the B disk? If there is one, would it have the appropriate video drivers for your current system? If that operating system was set up on a system that is too different from your current system, results will be "unpredictable" (i.e., almost anything -- or nothing -- could happen) if you try to boot from it. The results you describe quite possibly result from that problem.