If you've been following my saga, you know I had trouble with my mother's hard drive. It could be that my office is stuck in a harmonic convergence, or some magnetic vortex, but a month earlier, I had a hard drive fail on a test PC.
The error was "Boot Failure: System Halted" and it was new one for me. I started digging for answers and I bumped into DTIData, a hard drive recovery company.
They had a toll-free number and even though it was late afternoon on a Saturday, I decided to call. I spoke with Dick Correa, the chief programmer at DTIData, who immediately diagnosed it as a BIOS problem. "I can absolutely tell from the error message," he said. Once I reset the BIOS back to its default, a rebooted, the hard drive worked fine.
I learned lots in that one conversation with Dick -- and most of what he said is on his site. For instance, hard drive errors are ideal diagnostic tools, provided you can interpret them, Read Dick's blog entry describing how to use his NTFS Partition Recovery tool and you'll get details on five of the most common hard drive booting error messages.
If you're intrigued by Dick's material, take a look at Data Recovery Truth And Consequence and RAID: Five Steps to recovering your data
BTW, you might want to download their free DTIData NTFS Partition Recovery Tool and stash it on a floppy or a bootable CD, just in case. Read through the instructions[http://www.dtidata.com/ntfs_partition_repair.htm] to get a better idea what the tool can do.
You can also look at one of PC World's articles: Businesses Offered Do-It-Yourself Hard Drive Rescue. And if you're still in the dark about hard drives in general, browse to How It Works: Hard Drives.
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Talkback
Have something to say about hard drive or data recovery? You can use Comments below or if you'd prefer, fire an e-mail right into my inbox.
I'm not really into manually "saving my hard drive"
1. i forget
2. it's not very efficient
3. time consuming
I rather just buy DriveClone or TrueImage so it can automatically do all the work for me.
Why can't computer backups be as easy as a Palm sync, which is, after all, just a backup anyway? Initiatate the backup. The two units compare notes, and synchronize whatever's changed on one platorm, onto the other. If the same thing has been altered on both, it makes two copies and then notifies you to delete the one you don't want.