Reboot Help from a Guru....

[Condor]

The bigger HDs are faster. They are all 3.5" so the increased capacity is in multiple disks with multiple heads and higher data density. The bigger drives also generally have larger caches that help to speed things up as well.

 

Good to know. That oughta help. Picked up a 1T Sata HD at Fry's this morning for $70 bucks. It just happened to be on sale when the clerk rang it up. Normally $90. things are looking up....

[BuddyRich]

You sure your Dell is SATA or is it the older IDE ?

[Condor]

You sure your Dell is SATA or is it the older IDE ?

 

Nope it's SATA....

[Wizard765]

lots of times with that error you can run chkdsk /r at the command prompt and it will fix the problem. You would need to borrow a windows disk to get to the repair screen. I have done this many times and most of the time it works fine. BUT it usually means the drive is on it's way out so once it is running back up your stuff..

 

Wayne

[camos]

Almost everybody has their own preferences so I usually try to refrain from giving unasked for advice but I've been thinking about what I would do to organize a computer if I had a terabyte of space... so what the heck.

 

1. Install Windows on the 80 g drive formatted as one partition.

2. Partition the terabyte drive into 3-4 logical drives.

3. In Disk Management, change the drive letter of 1 logical drive to point to C:\Program Files.

4. Change the drive letter for another logical drive to point to C:\My Documents.

5. Change the Virtual Memory to a fixed amount using the Windows suggested total amount on each of 2 drives, the system drive and one of the un-dedicated logical drives, essentially doubling the size of the cache.

 

Doing 3 and 4 will allow the use of the default Windows folder usage which is most convenient while keeping program data and personal files off the system partition.

 

Doing 5 will prevent the cache from automatically fragmenting the hard drives every time the computer is rebooted.

 

Hope you don't mind these suggestions.

[Condor]

Almost everybody has their own preferences so I usually try to refrain from giving unasked for advice but I've been thinking about what I would do to organize a computer if I had a terabyte of space... so what the heck.

 

1. Install Windows on the 80 g drive formatted as one partition.

2. Partition the terabyte drive into 3-4 logical drives.

3. In Disk Management, change the drive letter of 1 logical drive to point to C:\Program Files.

4. Change the drive letter for another logical drive to point to C:\My Documents.

5. Change the Virtual Memory to a fixed amount using the Windows suggested total amount on each of 2 drives, the system drive and one of the un-dedicated logical drives, essentially doubling the size of the cache.

 

Doing 3 and 4 will allow the use of the default Windows folder usage which is most convenient while keeping program data and personal files off the system partition.

 

Doing 5 will prevent the cache from automatically fragmenting the hard drives every time the computer is rebooted.

 

Hope you don't mind these suggestions.

 

Don't mind at all... Thanks. I'll pass the info on, but at this point all I'm really interested in is getting the thing back up and running without loosing any workfiles and .jpg's. So we'll probably go with the first plan of slaving the old drive and using the 1T as the main. Although you never know what I'll get back, as Mike always seems to 'trick' things out when doing major repair....

[Condor]

OK, here's the final tail of the tape. The 'put is up and runing again with 2 HDs. One 80G and one Teribyte. The end result is I lost a ton of info. Not all of it, but at least 50%. Luckly all the family pics, and biz info, survived, but all the Venture pics and articles are history. It's rebuild time. Even lost all email addresses. I'm slowly but surely rebuilding the address book. Thanks to everyone for all the help and suggestions.

[midnightventure]

Not a good sign. My son-in-law has a gizmo where you can plug the hard drive into another computor's USB and treat it as a slave and write all the working files to CD's I wonder if doing that first and then reinstalling Windows would lessen the pain??

That would be worth a try. I have had good luck recovering things off hard drives with that method.