Is my hard drive dead and beyond resuscitation?

73marquitta · Apr-26-2004

Windows ME will not start. Hard disk not detected. Operating system not found. Prior to its "brain death" things had been running slow. System restore no longer worked no matter what box I checked and despite a new 80GB hard drive. REceived constant "system resources dangerously low" and "low virtual memory" errors and lockups. Incidentally, even before this I would regularly received random error messages despite memory upgrades and using regular ME maintenance utilities. (I'm told this is an ME flaw.) In the worst situations I'd always relied on System REstore, but now I'm lost. Please help.

I'm no pro, but I love my computer and tinker out of necessity. Not cheap, but financially challenged. Can anyone offer some home remedies?

Alan · Apr-26-2004

It sounds like a problem I had. In my case, my 'A' drive was faulty which cause the system resources to be eaten away by trying to load a non-exsistent floppy disc. Eventually the chip which recognises your hardware burnt out and then of course if it cant find the hard drive, it cant find the operating system. Unless someone has a better suggestion, you need to take your PC to a recognised engineer and have him replace the chip. Then either ask him or check yourself to see if any of the hardware devices are playing up. In my case the 'A' drive light was permanently on.

Alan

Alan · Apr-26-2004

Just another thought on the Low Resource Issue in ME, if this problem occurs mainly when using 'Word' then while in 'word' open the file 'normal.dot' and rename it to 'oldnormal.dot'. This will free up your resources.

Alan

dreamnid · May-03-2004

Try Ontrack Easy Recovery. You should look into the EasyProfessional Data Recovery. Even though it is a bit pricey, it is a great piece of software that allows you to recover data.

Try the Trail version first to see if it can find the missing files first.

http://www.ontrack.com