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HDD Problem
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Posted by: Grantyt3
My dad's hard drive seems to have died. At first, the computer would shutdown during bootup every once in a while. Then it started to become more frequent. Yesterday, it stopped booting at all. It would just shutdown after the black Vista boot screen.
After going in to the Vista installation disc to see if there was a repair option (which I tried and it didn't work), I noticed that if the bad drive was in, it would freeze when it was searching for drives to install to.
I took that drive out and installed Vista to the other drive because I wanted to see if I could get his data back that way, but I then found out that as long as the bad drive was plugged in, the computer would not boot. It just sat at a black screen. If the bad drive was unplugged, there were no problems.
What's going on with this drive? I'm guessing it's shot, but I was wondering if anyone knew of this and a way to fix it.
Fortunately, he did back up his data a day before onto an external hard drive, but he used the Vista Backup and Restore utility, and it seems to want to only restore the data to the same computer that it was backed up on.
The backup is stored in some kind of compressed/encrypted folders and the files are just named in just gibberish, so it seems we can't restore it without using the utility.
Does anyone know if there is a way to restore the files to a computer that was not used to do the backup?
Posted by: chainlink
Does the hard disk show as present in the BIOS? If not it's a fairly good indication that it's dead. If it does show up in the BIOS try switching SMART on as this may (and I stress may) give you an idea of what's wrong with it.
Posted by: Grantyt3
It does show up as recognized during boot. I'll see if I can turn on SMART.
EDIT: I enabled it in the BIOS. It still boots like it normally would, am I supposed to do something to see the information it gives?
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