It's getting late...

[orange]

Nothing you mentioned has done any good and I don't know what you mean by some repair tool. It doesn't recognize any system or whatever on the disc and it behaves the same as before.

AS for getting it in the computer and on line, one has to free the stupid screws they mounted it with and at least one will not budge.

I rolled back to August 28th too.

 

[Web Police]

It is window check disk part of windows software since dos. If your computer doesn't see the drive then forget about chkdsk.

Download DFT from the link I posted and check the disc that way.


The drive screws shouldn't be that tight?

 

[orange]

No, that just locks stuff up like Sing-Sing. I'm not going to touch it tonight. It's 10 PM already.

 

[orange]

None of the Christmas project files are lost...all my Phoenix stuff back to the Chrome tape designs 3 years ago was copied prior to the external drive problem.

 

[Web Police]

Time to get out the back DVD's?

 

[orange]

Well, 70-80% of it is probably ripped music files but I have a tonne of graphics elements and saved doohickeys from forums and such.

If I'm lucky I still have most of it sitting around on discs or on the Dimension.

A lot of it can be re-ripped. A couple of my CDs are long gone though.

You mean CD-Rs...I think I've only gotten stuff on a DVD twice and it's as much of a mystery to me as being single for 14 years.

 

[Web Police]

Yeah I meant backup DVD's. You may be able to recover the data if the drive is not totally toasted.

 

[orange]

Which backup DVDs would those be, mine or for something else?

I'm not going to recover the data on this drive unless it's the external housing itself at fault or I have forensic software.

I tried the Windows repair routines but after 20 minutes of sitting there and the damn routines never tell you what they are doing, plus the drive was ON for about a minute at the beginning, went dark for several minutes then sporadically lit and went dark a few more times. You can't eject it unless you wait several minutes for it to actually CALL it G: and half the time it's best to just shut down.

How long should I honestly expect to wait for Windows to diagnose faults or even set up program compatibility on the WHOLE computer with less than 400 GB or hard drive storage or ~111 GB of C: for just windows and Programs? The only other internal HDD is un occupied!

I can't even populate G: when it does show up anyway.

I had originally wanted to load each computer from an external drive, then I got the stuff I needed to serve from one computer in a network. Virtually none of this is working at the moment because every time I turn around and turn it on shtuff happens. I suppose that the drives I have are ancient as me and I'm a 2nd rack hacker who isn't in the right decade.

I'll retrieve the Synth Only Challenge cassette graphics from the forums so that's not in danger but I use versions of Corel Word Perfect (11) and Adobe Photoshop (7) that were barely designed for XP. Instead of thinking I should join the modern world and but stuff I can't even afford somebody should marvel that I'm some kind of CHEAP, TORTURED and PERSEVERANT freaky genius stubbornly trying to make it continue to work. Even a 750 GB SATA parked it's head to get in the back seat and mate for eternity. Does that make me want to get a 3 TB drive? Overkill! I'll die and so will it before it could be justified. I haven't even gotten around to fixing the television reception in well over a month, it's not even hooked up and I can get bad news on the computer anyway. If I can't get PBS, screw it.

I've got reruns of Casey Kasem at least and this time Chris Rea's "Fool" and Boston "Don't Look Back" are back to back, and I sing Fool at karaoke...one of my all time favorites. Ohhh...Hot Child In The City! This was a good chart! I can sing a lot of it too...

 

[Web Police]

The DVD's would be yours if you made any backup copies.

Depending upon what boxes you check in the windows repair I could see it taking 4 to 6 hours or more for the 250 gb drive. if it doesn't show any activity for long periods of time then windows is proabably not recognizing it. Win DFT would probably check the drive in an hour or two.

Unfortunately hardware does not last forever. I'd hope they would last longer, but even new drives will go kerplunk from time to time.

 

[orange]

Be nice if they either told you that or gave a progress indicator of some sort...watching an animated doohickie on the taskbar with a green bar going over it is useless as boar breastfeeding.

 

[orange]

I still had a good CONNER drive of ridiculously small size until I recycled it last year.

 

[Web Police]

The smart indicator on the drive can give you some indication of impending doom. Sometimes drives last forever and sometimes they last a

few days or weeks after the warranty runs out.

I don't have any IDE drives anymore, only sata drives.

 

[orange]

I'd have to restart to even see...but it's an external and USB doesn't give you that.

 

[Web Police]

If you can get it to work Win-DFT will check the smart status of usb drives.

 

[orange]

I'm having no problems of major note accessing it on the Dell Dimension 2350 from XP.

 

[orange]

As IDE not USB.

 

[Web Police]

If you can access the drive then maybe the usb housing went belly up, or possibly the motherboard usb ports are having issues, either driver or hardware. You can test that too by putting another IDE drive you have laying around. If that drive works then posbily your mothervorads usb ports are going south.

 

[orange]

The other one works fine, this was established at the beginning and through swapping.

But now XP saw it, said it has been installed and then it had a problem.

Either there is a drive problem or one of the power supply isn't good but then I swapped the PS units and that wasn't it.

Now I have to go back and figure out how I got it recognized on that Dimension 2350 in the first place. It just says something has malfunctioned with no real specifics...WHAT ARE THEY, UNION?

 

[orange]

It's 7 pm, so when the hell do I get to do something useful or even ride my bike?

I'm not married to the thing, I just wanted to transfer the data. Now I gotta go find what I did two months ago.

 

[orange]

I'm shutting down tonight, there is no reason to be in here and fester.