I’ve reset the flat battery style CMOS but it did not work. I believe that there may be a bad sector on the hard drive affecting the video drivers. I can boot from the HP Diagnostics CD, but this appears to be a Linux variant that appears to load its own driver set without reference to the HDD at all. I think I shall have to replace the hard drive and ‘slave’ the old unit to it to see if any file recovery is possible! Is there likely to be any problem? The hard drive is a SATA drive. There are no IDE sockets on this motherboard.
Some of the other options that I can offer to you before you go ahead and purchase a new hard drive include:
- Scanning for spyware/viruses since these forms of malware can attack your operating system and lead to problems such as you are having. Update your anti-spyware/anti-virus application before running it.
- If you don’t have a program, I can recommend Anti-Virus PLUS.
- Performing a soft restore with the installation, restore, or boot disk should allow you to retain your data and hopefully, it should fix your boot sector.
- Clean the registry using a registry cleaner such as RegCure.
If you haven’t tried any of these strategies yet, they are viable options. At the very least, they can’t hurt.
Recover Data from Damaged Hard Drive
If you want to recover data from a damaged hard drive, you can swap it out for a new one as you mentioned. Then, you have two options available to you. The damaged drive can either be set as slave and you can access it to retrieve your data or you can place it in an external hard drive case and access it that way. You will need a USB port on the computer though if you decide to use an external hard drive case. If you experience any difficulty retrieving your data from the hard drive, you can try using data recovery software such as Data Recovery Pro.
Slaving Hard Drive
When you add a second hard drive, as you already seem to know, you must go about the task of slaving one of the hard drives. The computer can only communicate with a single hard drive at a time. Take your new hard drive and set it as master while setting the old hard drive as slave as you have suggested. It is possible to slave a hard drive on a computer that does not have any IDE slots on the motherboard using the same type of set up as you did for the master. You simply need to designate it as the slave.
Swapping Hard Drives
As long as you purchase a hard drive that is compatible with your system, you shouldn’t have any difficulties completing the task you have suggested. Just make sure that you take all of the appropriate safety precautions when working with the hardware including disconnecting the computer from the power and grounding yourself before doing the work.
Related article:
Retrieving Data from a Malfunctioning Computer
Susan Keenan | June 24th, 2009
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