PruritusAni

Last night while busy being awful at Counterstrike I was on the receiving end of a massive BSOD. I scrambled for paper and pen to write some of the stuff down but the computer shut down before i could write down anything. I thought nothing of it, and decided to go to sleep instead. Tonight, upon an attempt to restart the computer I was greeted by this:
So I fired up the ol' Google machine and found out that this problem is one of those. No one seems to know what causes it, and furthermore no one seems to agree on how to fix it. I did find a lot of possible solutions and have tried some of them:

Things I've tried:

1) change the SATA port and cable for the drive, make sure it's still the boot disk in the BIOS and restart. ==> No DIce

2) reset BIOS to defaults, make sure the disk drive is the boot disk even if in port 4. CLRTC jumper action ==> I now get this:
So I obeyed the lovely error message and:

3) tried running Startup Repair and after it did its thing it said:

and clicking on the diagnosis and repair details found:
This sounded pretty hopeful, so I hit finish to restart and removed the win 7 disk out of the drive. The computer starts, flashes the POST at me as it always does and presents me with a blinking cursor. That does nothing, typing anything at it doesn't do anything and the only key combination that works is CtrlAltDel.

So at this point I fire the win 7 disk up again, and try some other things:

4 ) try to run CHKDSK /R /P from a console i was able to start up in the repair. It tells me that /P is an invalid parameter so I try it with just /R

I try it again without /R and it runs amazingly quickly, with:

there was more to that output, but 3086 kb of total disk space coupled with X:\Sources> being my command prompt told me that it was not going to get me anywhere. So going down the list of crazy things to try from the internets:

5) try to run FIXBOOT from the console. I am told that fixboot doesn't exist.

6) try to run FIXMBR from the console. I am told that FIXMBR doesn't exist.

So I restart the machine again, and this time after the POST flashes through in its usual way I'm faced with the same blinking cursor from above.

I'm feeling pretty aggravated by this point so in an act of "maybe it'll work?":

7) I am now running Spinrite's level 2 on the disk over night.

I'll update in the morning upon waking, but in the meantime as I'd like to keep my drive I turn to you:
Have any of you battled this before? How did you fare in the battle? Any hints, tips, suggestions appreciated.

Takaharu

I'd suggest trying it in another PC to see if it's detected. It sounds pretty dead as it stands.

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PruritusAni

Well SpinRite said this:

I suppose Ill try and see if it gets seen on my mom's machine, and maybe try memtest too as the very last tests.

UPDATE: Well I came back home and memtest ran a bunch of tests 5 and 8 while I was at school finding no errors. So the memory is not at fault here, leaving me with the last option of trying the drive in my mom's computer.

As an interesting aside I found some info on this 5672 error thrown by SpinRite:

So as it turns out this error doesn't really mean much in the way of the disk's health. So now I must find a program that does the job SpinRite was supposed to do, but right. Do you have any recommendations?

I'll update again after dinner and the attempt involving mom's computer.

PruritusAni

well while trying to do all sorts of last minute things i decided i'd throw in a flash drive with xubuntu on it. From xubuntu (10.04) I decided i'd inspect the drive in question using 2 different utilities: Disk Utility and GSmartControl. Upon a quick test both report the drive is just fine, no errors nothing!! I've even went to run a read only benchmark which it did quite well in, no errors here either!


Finally I transplant it into mom's computer where upon being run as the boot drive it produces the same blinking cursor that does nothing.
When I use mom's drive as the boot, it recognizes it, and proceeds to tell me that I need to format the disk before using it.

So I suppose at this point I admit defeat, but I'd like to reclaim my data from it. I'll experiment with a few things but I can't say I'm too hopeful at this point.


This is definitely one of the weirdest and maddening errors I've ever encountered. I just wish I knew what I did, so I can avoid doing it again.

[hobo]eclipse

try this

Active@ Partition Recovery.Restoring lost partition.Recovering MBR.

sounds like you some how lost your partition.

also have you tried a new cable, just to be sure.

edit: can u see the files in linux?

PruritusAni

I did try a new SATA cable among the very first things I did.
I can't see the files in xubuntu. That would make recovery too easy.
I'll give this partition recovery thing a try after breakfast and I'll let you know how it went.

UPDATE: I tried the partition recovery, had it fix the boot sector on the drive and it seemed to have done something! I now can access that drive on my mom's computer. My computer on the other hand is unmoved, so it's still displaying that blinking cursor when I try to boot from it.

So I decided to connect my backup drive to mom's computer as well, to recover all of my stuff. Nevertheless this drive is also broken?!?!? and a scan by partition recovery revealed 4 partitions labeled Bad, Very Bad, Very Bad and Very Bad. I am now running a long scan to see if maybe i can recover it. More later

UPDATE2: After long hours of scanning the backup drive and fruitless attempts at recovery I decided to format my backup drive and rescue as much as possible from the original drive onto it. I've ordered a new disk that I'll use as my new boot drive.

Judas

fixmbr and boot not excisting suggests something odd.... they should excist.. if your booting from a cd/dvd which has it...

i don't know.. something else might be problematic...

might be worthwhile running memtest or loading on another machine to make sure..

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[hobo]eclipse

sounds like your on the right track. i have used this app a time or 2 but not often, friend of mine has a bad habit of formating the wrong drive in windows, this has saved him a bunch of times, lol.

im goin to guess it will show the bad as the newest (one you want to recover) and the very bads being other partitions that you intentionally formated over before all this (windows re install)

the bad just having a messed partition table should have all your data intact (as u seen in other cpu), and the very bad partition remnants are there, but the hdd sectors have been overwritten by the files from your newest partition.

all else fails, u got your data goods, just zero write format the entire drive, and try it again.

PruritusAni

So after the long scan i told it to recover everything it had found but it did nothing by doing so. Windows asked me to format the drive so that I'd be able to use it, so I did, giving up on ever getting my back up stuff back.

I did see your reply and tried looking at it again. all my stuff is in a Lost and found folder, and i don't know how to get it out of there. I see it in Active Partition, but i don't know how to get it out of there. I'm currently scanning the drive with Recover my Files in hopes of being able to get it out of there. More updates later.


PS Judas, memtest was among the very first things i tried, no errors found. After i had "fixed" the drive running fixmbr and the likes appeared to do something, but the computer still refused to boot from that drive. It's as if the mobo and the drive are strictly not on speaking terms.

Judas

usually things like that would suggest a control failing issues..

I've seen a hardrive boot on one.. but not another..

thought it was the hardrive.. but after about 3 weeks with a new drive..... similare thing happened.... the controller was completely disagreeing or just failing to work steady..

additionally it seemed to "wreck" the hardrives it was connected to.. as the drives would perform slowly or irratically on another machine... but still mostly work.

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PruritusAni

Well it seems as though i am able to recover files off the drive. There is however a catch: they are not at all labeled by their original names but instead are called things like:

Recovered mp3 file 41743836836969.mp3
Recovered text file 2491239478129.txt

and so on. There seems to be no folder structure left, and everything is piled together haphazardly in the Lost Files folder.

This of course is going to make the recovery process near to impossible, as I'd have to rename a trillion things over the course of the next few years. I'd be better off not even worrying about it at this point.

I found a few externals that had a good portion of the files/folders on there, and i have access to the boot drive, which had a good portion of the back up stuff on there.

I guess I'll reinstall windows 7 on the new drive I ordered today and hope that i'll never have to deal with this sort of nonsense again.

Thanks all for your help.