Hi Folks, Your experience may help here. Today I was phoned by a friend who'd switched on her PC only to get the message "Operating system not found", together with the observation that "DHCP" and "MBA" had come up on screen. The only special circumstance was that the machine had been left unused and switched off for just over a week. So I went round and had a look. Switch on, and enter Setup. Check Boot Order: Floppy, CD-ROM, HDD, Network, and MBA-UNDI. So decided that this was consistent with failing to boot off HDD and proceeding to try booting off the network ("DHCP") which failed (since no network) and then "MBA-UNDI" (whatever that is). So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened. Provisionally, therefore, thought that the week's off-time had resulted in the CMOS battery draining, so that it had lost its data which were somehow restored when I went into Setup and poked around. But then it occurred to me that if that were so, then the CMOS clock should have the wrong time (e.g. some hours or days slow). Not so: in fact it was 5 minutes fast. So that seems to not favour my hyptohesis. Leaving me wondering what might really have happened. The only thing I did was have a look inside the Setup and re-boot, not altering a thing. Any ideas? With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Feb-06 Time: 22:00:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
Sounds to me like a hosed master boot record. If its running windows you *should* be able to boot off the cd and restore the mbr, if its linux you can boot off a rescue/install cd and re-install grub/lilo Hope this help Stuart
Hi Folks,
Your experience may help here. Today I was phoned by a friend who'd switched on her PC only to get the message "Operating system not found", together with the observation that "DHCP" and "MBA" had come up on screen.
The only special circumstance was that the machine had been left unused and switched off for just over a week.
So I went round and had a look. Switch on, and enter Setup. Check Boot Order: Floppy, CD-ROM, HDD, Network, and MBA-UNDI.
So decided that this was consistent with failing to boot off HDD and proceeding to try booting off the network ("DHCP") which failed (since no network) and then "MBA-UNDI" (whatever that is).
So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened.
Provisionally, therefore, thought that the week's off-time had resulted in the CMOS battery draining, so that it had lost its data which were somehow restored when I went into Setup and poked around.
But then it occurred to me that if that were so, then the CMOS clock should have the wrong time (e.g. some hours or days slow).
Not so: in fact it was 5 minutes fast. So that seems to not favour my hyptohesis.
Leaving me wondering what might really have happened. The only thing I did was have a look inside the Setup and re-boot, not altering a thing.
Any ideas?
With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Feb-06 Time: 22:00:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
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-- The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 22:00 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened.
I've had this before on a failing hard drive...randomly fails to be seen by the Bios....very very common on a limited range of Fujitsu units..can end one day in total failure so I'd encourage her to backup soon (if she doesn't already) It can also be caused by drive stiction, but that more often occurs after the machine has been left off for a longer time.
On 13-Feb-06 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 22:00 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened.
I've had this before on a failing hard drive...randomly fails to be seen by the Bios....very very common on a limited range of Fujitsu units..can end one day in total failure so I'd encourage her to backup soon (if she doesn't already)
It can also be caused by drive stiction, but that more often occurs after the machine has been left off for a longer time.
Thanks for this info, Wayne. New to me, but pleased that it's a recognisable phenomenon. And for the advice. I'm hoping it may be "stiction", rather than a more fundamental terminal disease, but will consider all possibilities! What, by the way, in "stiction", sticks? Is it the mechanism which traverses the heads over the disk surfaces? (That would explain the failure to find the "missing operating system". Or could it be that the disks themselves don't start to spin? I suppose the simplest cure is a new HDD, install alongside the old one, boot from Linux on a Floppy, and then dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd and drink a cup of coffee. Thanks, and any further comments will be welcome! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 14-Feb-06 Time: 07:56:43 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
Just to confirm. I had the same issue with a old Western Digital 8 gig drive that was on it's last legs. Every now and then it would fail to respond to the computer, and the computer therefore thought the drive didn't exist. By the symptoms you describe (computer trying other boot options), this is what's happening here. I suggest a full backup and the drive gets replaced asap. It's only downhill from here, sadly.
On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 07:56 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
What, by the way, in "stiction", sticks? Is it the mechanism which traverses the heads over the disk surfaces? (That would explain the failure to find the "missing operating system". Or could it be that the disks themselves don't start to spin?
It's the disks themselves that won't spin What happens is that when a drive is running the gap between the heads and the platter is maintained by air friction/aerodynamics...as the drive spins down the heads move to a landing zone (part of the disk that isn't written to) and when the drive is stationary the heads are actually in contact with the disk (sounds scary I know but it's better than them clanging against it every time the drive is moved) Anyway sometimes for whatever reason the friction between the heads and the platter is too much for the (fairly weak) drive motor to overcome. In terminal cases there are several unscientific methods to fix this..one being what I like to call the radial wave. Where you twist the drive in a jerky movement to attempt to free the platters inside.
On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 07:56 +0000, Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
What, by the way, in "stiction", sticks? Is it the mechanism which traverses the heads over the disk surfaces? (That would explain the failure to find the "missing operating system". Or could it be that the disks themselves don't start to spin?
It's the disks themselves that won't spin
What happens is that when a drive is running the gap between the heads and the platter is maintained by air friction/aerodynamics...as the drive spins down the heads move to a landing zone (part of the disk that isn't written to) and when the drive is stationary the heads are actually in contact with the disk (sounds scary I know but it's better than them clanging against it every time the drive is moved)
Anyway sometimes for whatever reason the friction between the heads and the platter is too much for the (fairly weak) drive motor to overcome.
In terminal cases there are several unscientific methods to fix this..one being what I like to call the radial wave. Where you twist the drive in a jerky movement to attempt to free the platters inside.
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Not really worth it for personal data and mp3's etc but a few specialised companies offer data recovery services. In your case they would strip out the platters and attach them to a new head unit, recover the data and write it out to a new one for you. What they can recover even in some extreme failures is amazing. A company I worked for paid £5000 for data recovery once, they got everything back from a drive that had been electrically cooked. Very expensive but useful in certain circumstances. (we learned all about backups that day!) Its the same technology that *could* be used in a forensic case. Stuart -- The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 17:25 +0000, Stuart Fox wrote:
Not really worth it for personal data and mp3's etc but a few specialised companies offer data recovery services. In your case they would strip out the platters and attach them to a new head unit, recover the data and write it out to a new one for you. What they can recover even in some extreme failures is amazing. A company I worked for paid £5000 for data recovery once, they got everything back from a drive that had been electrically cooked. Very expensive but useful in certain circumstances. (we learned all about backups that day!) Its the same technology that *could* be used in a forensic case.
We have used the services of Ontrack Data recovery before for this sort of thing...prices are lower nowadays (it used to be a pound a MB !!!) The last drive I had to send to them cost me circa £500..but they charge depending on the size of the volume not the size of the data recovered...so big drives become very expensive. For electrical only faults it is possible to get somewhere sometimes with a like for like board swap between (exactly) the same drives...there is unit specific geometry information on the board and of course lots of bad sector mapping info (both of which change between drives) but in extreme moments of being stuffed this has worked (to a degree) for me in the past. The trick is to not mount the drive (one write with the wrong geometry will trash lots of data around it) dump a bit for bit image...mount the image loopback style and then try to repair the filesystem. However I suspect that this gets less and less likely to work as platter densities go up. Also I have since been told that this can be very dangerous...because if the geometry is too far out the drive firmware will think that lots of sectors have gone bad..and automatically start remapping them on the platter (even when the drive is powered but not mounted)...which then puts you in a far worse scenario than when you started.
participants (4)
-
Richard Brooklyn -
Stuart Fox -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood