computer thrown down the stairs

[mlazzaro]

there was a fight in my house last night and for some reason one of the house computers got thrown down a flight of stairs :cry: . well i checked to see that everything was pluged in and that nothing was cracked. after a compleat inspection i tryed to turn it on. it gets to the line
Verifying dmi pool data...........................

then

a disk read error occurred press ctrl + alt + del to restart


and i can't get past that
any one have any ideas of what i should do to fix this

thanks

[Mr. C]

Firstly I might suggest you should check into acquiring some single floor accomodations.

Beyond that, a step by step examination of each connection of each component - concentrating particularly on the motherboard itself.

If nothing is obvious, cut back to barebones. mobo, cpu, mem, vid card, hdd.
Try to access the BIOS and check that all settings are correct.

You could attempt to boot from CD. Perhaps a format and reinstall could kick that HDD to life? All you could do is try? Perhaps an fdisk /MBR ?

Computers don't handle violence well at all:smokin:

Good luck with it!

[Wiggo]

Try the hard drive in another PC and scandisk it for errors as this would probably be the part that gets damage first in an impact of any sort with the heads comin' into contact with the disk surface. ;)

<small>I'm not sure that I'd like one just thrown to the floor even</small> :eek:
<center>:cheers:</center>

[mlazzaro]

i pulled the hd and put it in a different computer booted it up as a slave and tried a scandisk. the computer then froze and now that computer is ****ed up and not working even after i took the hd that went down the stairs out.

i put the hd back in the computer that went down the stairs and put in the windows disk and am tring to repair it. it's scaning the disk now and will see what happens.

[The__tweaker]

hdd's don't survive any violence at all. Once they have taken a hit or maybe gotten dropped they never be the same again. If you should get it to work again i strongly suggest you not to store any important data on it since it may fail within time.

Just as Wiggo says, the disc get's an physical damage from the head/heads... sorry :cry:

I just hope no person were injured during the battle, hardware can be replaced but not human health... : peace2:

[Wiggo]

Certainly not an appliance for crash testin' as knocks can be bad enough. :no:

<center> </center>

[Mr. C]

If this is becoming a case of retrieving data from a drive rather than restoring a drive to a usable condition. (which seems to be the unfortunate turn this thread is taking)

I'd like to reccomend (once again) my favorite free recovery software - Disk Investigator at;
http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html

However, should that prove useless - which may well be the case in this particular instance:cry:

You might try installing that drive in a system running Linux -- of course that will probably only be useful in a FAT 16/32 partitioned drive. Although you should still be able to read an NTFS partition which is all that is neccesary in this case.
Perhaps through Linux you will be able to at least pull data from the drive to transfer to a Windows installation on a healthy HDD.

No guarantees now mind you, but worth a try if a Linux machine is handy.

I have found in some instances that the more robust Linux environment can handle some instances of damaged hard disks much better than Windows.
My Linux installation is actually on a HDD that Windows has major problems with (like locking up at the exact same place on a scandisk or defrag at each and every attempt). But Linux has yet to encounter any problem with the drive -- yeah, that 1 has me stumped too, but I can at least use the drive still.

[mlazzaro]

i went a baught a maxtor 120 gig hd form best by because of the mail in rebate and installed xp on that. i set that hd to master and got everything set up and going. i then took the hd that had been down the stairs and set it up as the slave. i was able to get almost all the data off it it that i wanted. now i have a 60 gig drive what has been down the stair. well does anyone know if lower lever formatting will do anything for it. and if it will how do i go about doing that with f disk? or is there another way

[Mr. C]

You could try going to the manufacturer's site and DL'ing their disk utilities.
Could be the drive is wracked, but it is worth taking a shot at.

[Maxpowers]

what brand name is the hard drive?? ussually u can get it replaced under a warranty since u dont have to tell them what happened