Help again! Hard Drive Problem

[MOSTAFA]

I have a removable FireLite 80Gb Hard Drive which I attach to my Laptop on a regular basis. It has worked perfectly for the last year or so but - Sadly, yesterday I left it connected to the laptop whilst going out and on! We had a power cut! and now the compuer does not want to recognise the hard drive at all. In the past on command "My Computer" it recognised the drive as "FireLite" now it shows up as "Local Disk (F:) and when I plug it in it only seems to read part of the drive and will not let me access any of the drive at all. Any help at all would be most grateful.

Regards.

[Desert Dingo]

I had a similar problem with a laptop last week.
The hard drive was recovered by using Steve Gibson's program "SpinRite 6"
It is pure magic!
You will find info at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

[vapilot2004]

Try turning the computer off (not just hibernate or standby) and power down and disconnect the external drive.

Reboot the computer and wait for Windows to load and logon.

Reconnect the drive, switch on and wait for any prompts or indications XP offers. You may see activity on the taskbar by the clock. If you are prompted for a driver disk, use the one that came with the drive.

Check your My Computer again. If still no joy, try rebooting the machine with the drive on and connected.

Good Luck!

[nasib]

Desert Dingo

I got Spinrite6 and I'm having some difficulty running it. I'm not sure which drivers to "add" to the Cd with the software on it, as per the instructions.

Running Windows XP Home with all updates etc., on a Dell Inspiron Laptop.

Are you able to help?

Many thanks,

Nasib

[Saab Dastard]

Mostafa,

You can't run Spinrite directly on the USB drive from within Windows - and you probably won't find DOS drivers for your USB drive. See the Spinrite FAQ (http://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm).

What you have to do is create a bootable floppy / CD / USB memory stick using the Windows portion of Spinrite.

Then remove the hd from its enclosure, and (assuming it's the same form factor as the laptop) swap it with the HD from your laptop.

You then boot the laptop with the bootable medium created above and THEN get Spinrite to do its stuff.

If it's a full-size disk in the firelite, then you need to get hold of a desktop PC.

Have you tried accessing the firelite from another PC?

SD

[MOSTAFA]

Thanks everybody for the constructive help. Further looking into the problem I have un-earthed a much bigger problem. In the end I decided that I should format the Hard drive and it is now working perfectly! BUT other starange things started to happen. D drive started to play up - mouse pointer strated going for walkies across the screen.

I decided to look at the most recent programs that I have put on the computer Namely FS X and tried to remove it using the uninstall method provided. Surprise Surprise, it wouldn't let me and and told me that if I continued to try it would format my C drive ie, "Do you want to format Drive C now" To me - that smacks of virus? I have managed to individually get rid of FS X down to a handful of files but they ae not going anywhere. My machine is protected by McAfee full suite and even the shredder in there won't do it.

Any help greatly appreciated - please

[Cypherus]

Stubourn files of this type are often found to be associated with some type of Malware or Virus as the so called 'Owners' pathetically try to prevent removal, they can also be actual windows files also.
The problem arises because the associated program, utility, or Malware is allowed to take ownership of the file as the computer boots up, once this happens you will always get the familair 'Denied Access' tag when you try and delete them.
Happy days though someone has devised a simple method to get around this without resorting to registry hacks.

http://www.softwarepatch.com/software/moveonboot.html

Download MOVE ON BOOT and follow the instructions,there is also a small tutorial that explains how it works and why these files are so problematic, the program will allow the files to be relocated at BOOT so preventing the associated program from locating and protecting them, from there they can easily be deleted.

[MOSTAFA]

Hi Cypherus,

Many thanks for that. I tried but they are not going - stubborn sods. Do you know of any other cleaners?

Whatever I try to do to the files brings up a "cyclic redundancy" message just occasionally it asks me after opening the file if I am sure I want to format the c drive.

That might be the only option but as usual I have so many programs and data it would take for ever.

Regards