Sunday 11 November 2007

Windows Install : Bad news

hmm, it seems that my Hardrive is sort of dead. It now says "S.M.A.R.T status BAD", and exit the boot sequence, even when I try to boot on the CD... No good at all...

I tried to boot on the Windows install CD, and copy the Hard Drive to an external disk, but at first the Drive was not even recognized. I then tried to disable (temporarily) SMART in the BIOS, and it boots, but when it seems to never enter into Recovery, the CD seems to not work at all anymore..

There is a high chance that I will not even be able to backup my files to my external removable drive. Even if there are few files I have only on this hard drive, I'm sure there's some...

Plus I worked part of the Week-end to finish some very important programming work, I have almost finished, but it's on the Hard drive...

Update (23:00) : After numerous attempts, I found a fantastic utility program called UBCD. It's a Linux tool (a Windows version is available, but is not up-to-date), but it's not a problem when even your OS can't boot... So I booted on a CD created with UBCD's ISO image. Their is a collection of utilities, and some of them are able to recover hard disks failures... (like with late floppy disks). Using it, I was able to reformat the hard drive (quick reformat, I hope to be able to get back some datas after all this mayhem), and launch the XP installation program. Only time will tell if it will work at the end.

However, I will try another tool (called gdbfn) after that. This tool is seemingly able to recover datas on a hard disk, even after a quick reformat... hmm, and after all that, even if it works, I think I will need to change my laptop... I'm still on SMART option disabled, after all, this is not very good, don't you think ?

I'm doomed !!

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