Problems with my HD

[mickey]

Please somebody help me! I am having trouble with my hard drive ( Problems include my machine stopping and starting, making funny noises, blue screens,( you name it, it's done it). My machine has been playing up a little for a while I haven't been able to get my defragmenter to work for many months, and when I finally did last week my problems seemed to have escalated. So I decided to reformat the hard drive and reload everything, but on trying to do this today it would not accept my boot disk, I keep getting the following message:

'Non system disk or disk error, replace and strike any key when ready'

On reading another post on your site I took some advice to download a diagnostic tool to see what is wrong with it but the instructions say that I have to run the boot disk first. What can I do?

O/S: Windows ME
Hard drive: Samsung disk, and the diagnostic tool that I downloaded was: shdiag.exe

Any help would be much appreciated

[andyms18a]

first check in the bios for first boot device and set it to cdrom then boot with your win me cd if that dont work try seting first boot to flopy and try another boot disk

[pam123]

Download the diagnostic from your hard drive manufacturer and copy it to a floppy.
Put the floppy drive first in the boot order and run it.
It sounds like your HDD has finally died so I hope it's still under warranty.


That wasn't clear: A boot disk is made in the command prompt window with a formatted floppy, I haven't used Me in a long time so a search in the 9X section will give you the answer. I'm surprised you need to do that though.
What I'm wondering is ,why haven't you used scan disk in ME?
If that drive has bad sectors it will show it to you, in fact has scan disk started up on it's own after any of your crashes ?
You should be getting error messages, what do they say ?

[mike breck]

When you boot up with your Win98 or Me Startup Disk (Bootdisk) do should arrive at the A:\> prompt or C:\WINDOWS>

If the Bootdisk is not working, then try another Bootdisk or download one from www.bootdisk.com

A Win98 or Me disk should do the job.

I think what Samsung want you to do is copy shdiag.exe
to the Bootdisk and then bootup. When you get to the A:\> prompt you then type shdiag. If that doesn't work, the type shdiag.exe

[mickey]

Thanks for your help everyone...

andyms18a: I didn't realise that I could boot up with my Windows ME recovery disk, so I will try this later when I get home.

mike breck & pam123: I have tried to boot from 2 different boot disks, one which I got from my computer(rescue/boot disk) and one which I got from another website (could well have been bootdisk.com). Neither will boot my computer. I have added shdiag.exe to my boot disks.

Sorry I forgot to mention that Scan disk has completely stopped working on my computer. I have problems starting up my machine now, I get a message telling me that because I didn't shutdown my machine properly that scandisk will have to scan my computer, and scan disk starts up, but then after a few seconds I get a message telling me that I have a problem with my C drive which prevents it from scanning.

I too think that my Hard disk may be on its last legs, but am just checking in case I can salvage it as it's not still under warranty, I will have to buy a new one.

[pam123]

I use maxtor, but pick the one you like best.
If you have a cd-rw drive, sticking the HDD in the freezer for an hour, use a freezer bag and squeeze out all the air, may let you get the data you need from it.

[glc]

I dont think the freezer trick will work here - Samsung drives die from media deterioration, not heat issues. The freezer trick works best on Quantums when the controller chip overheats.

I wouldn't even bother trying to run diags - slave the drive into another machine (or install a new drive, load it up, and slave the old drive back in) and attempt to copy your data off is the best way to go now. This is classic Samsung failure symptoms.