200 ways to revive a hard drive

7 December 2008 |



We based one of our most popular pop quiz challenges on a situation every tech support person has faced or will face at least once: a failed hard drive. In that particular case, a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 user was getting errors like "disk 0 error" and "invalid drive specification." Here were the other facts in the case:

- The data wasn't backed up.
- The problem came out of nowhere.
- The user had accessed Setup and tried to manually enter the settings for the drive type when "Auto" didn't work.
- There was no startup disk made by this machine.

Reviving a drive like that one-even if only long enough to copy its data before you throw the drive in the garbage-is a tough challenge. When I asked TechRepublic members how they would troubleshoot a situation like this one, we received over 200 solutions, and we heard from a number of TechRepublic members who wanted to know "what everybody else suggested." So we decided to publish this collection of over 200 ways to revive a hard drive...

Download full article: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6QZC4EOL

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