Second Hard Drive

[Quint]

Win XP Home. My Maxtor 40 gig HDD went caput yesterday. Took it to my tech guy and he said non recoverable which I had pretty much determined. I was on internet and went to a page on Amazon.com, screen locked up, drive started clicking, and all was over. Can a virus do that, or just bad drive? Main question: I want to add a second hard drive (non-RAID) as a back up storage device. That way if main HDD becomes corrupted or fails, I will have the back up on the second HDD. Do I format second with XP disc as I do the main HDD and install the OS, then copy data, or is there a better/easier way? Thanks

[mookydooky]

Virus can't do that.

The easiest way is to setup a RAID 1 mirror, but if you don't want to do that, what you have planned is a bit tricky. The reason is because the second install of WinXP is going to want to be activated. When WinXP phones home, it'll report an odd event and I have no idea how it will respond. You can probably call MS and asking them for the activation code.

If I were you, I'd set up a RAID-1 mirror, especially if you have RAID built into the motherboard.

[Quint]

I did not want to mirror because if corrupted with virus it would still get both drives, right? Can I just format second HDD without installing OS for storage purposes? If so, I need instructions on how to format without using XP disk? Thanks

[cadaveca]

each Manufacturer has a tool to do as you are asking.
CLicking in the HD is a bad thing...and yes, the drive is dead.
Was it a Western DIgital?

[Quint]

It was a Maxtor 40 gig 7200 rpm. What do you mean by "clicking in?" As you can tell I have limited knowledge of these things! Thanks

[cadaveca]

the HDD "clicking" is a bad thing. It generallt means the HDD is dead, or on it's way out.


Disconnect power from the drive for a bit, get your OS on the second, and try reconnecting the second. It MAY work long enough for you to retrieve the data, but then again, it might not.

[mookydooky]

Originally Posted by Quint

I did not want to mirror because if corrupted with virus it would still get both drives, right? Can I just format second HDD without installing OS for storage purposes? If so, I need instructions on how to format without using XP disk? Thanks

To format, just plug the disk in. Then once you're in Windows, right click the drive for the options. Select "format."

[woodeirl]

did you ever hear about the freezer technique ?

[Lazgoat]

sounds interesting....

Originally Posted by woodeirl

did you ever hear about the freezer technique ?

[woodeirl]

(this is for getting back data from a fecked up hdd) instead of sending to Ontrack)

when i was over in germany visiting Family my cousin sven told me about the freezer technique, so one day my hard drive of my laptop went caput with all that clicking sounds etc. and i had alot of documents from college on it. so he told me to get the HDD and put it into the freezer for about 1hr 1/2 and then straight back into the laptop and guess what it worked my windows 98 booted up and i was able to get most of my files to a floppy for about 30 min before the HDD would act up on me again.

and it still works for me not unless the motor inside is fried or the platter has fallen off somehow.

so try it and see

[fantomfreq]

I don't know about your specific needs or wants for this second hard drive, but I use an external hard drive in an enclosure with my laptop. I use cloning software to make a fully bootable copy of my drive, which keeps me covered on all fronts. Not only that, but since the external drive is bigger than my internal drive, I created a partition which stores any large files that I would like to archive. It's worked out great for me so far, but then again I've never had a hard drive fail on me. I'm just hedging my bets.

[woodeirl]

better be safe than sorry buddy

[Chernobyl]

I had exactly the same thing with an IBM deathstar
The drive was thoroughly unuseable.

I got nearly all the data off it using this
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

WHAT A FANTASTIC FREE TOOL !
Can you let us know if it works?