Another Drive bites the Dusta

[comda]

Greetings!

Last week my Possible father in law (haha) macbook pro decided to give us a failing drive and its being delt with. Last night however i was installing Photoshop elements for my room mate on his old HP/Compaw nc6400 and after the restart the computer kept blue screening and restarting. I tried to then boot it into Safe mode with no avail. I immediately copied all his personal data off the drive. The weird part was when i tried to connect it to my windows machine the drive kept asking for a format. So i simply used my macbook. everything copied just fine.

Windows 7 decided to try to repair startup and the machine rebooted doing checkdisk and it found 60kb in bad sectors. I decided today to run HDD Regen and thats been scanning since 11am today. So far the software has found over 1400 delays.

So just as a second opinion.. This old drive (its a 100Gb Sata hitachi i think is the manufacturer) is on its way out. Right?

 

[Calum]

Sounds that way...I certainly wouldn't trust it and would be replacing it asap.

[comda]

Its still doing the scan in HDD regenerator and its now at 2000+ delays and 61% completed. I'm lettting it finish and then definitely replacing it. sadly all i have is a 80Gb 5400RPM drive though.. oh well it will do just fine for him.

Thanks for confirming my issue. Well appreciated.

[Geek-9pm]

There is no point i going further.
That device now qualifies as a doorstop.
No further testing needed.

[patio]

Guess how old 100G HDD's are ? ?

[comda]

Well the laptop is from 2005. the scan went on for 5 hours and found 3700 delays. I just gave up then and plopped in my 80gb that ill be donating to my roomie. I just had to burn a x86 copy of windows 7 cause the C2D centrino is a 32bit. it gave me an error when i tried a 64 bit disk. The 100gb drive was hot and smelled of burning. RIP>

[patio]

Services will be held Saturday at 10:00 AM for all who would like to attend...

[comda]

One more thing i have to ask. And haha Patio. I have the system up and going and even with a Legal copy of windows 7 pro thanks to our University. But there are 2 things making me mad. One. The old drive although loaded with errors will not mount to a windows machine. It just asks to be formatted while on a mac/linux mounts just fine.

The second is the laptops multimedia keys. The laptop is a Hp/Compaq nc6400 and Since its only a Intel T2500 its a 32bit so 32bit windows 7 pro. On hps site i got all the drivers from the Vista home and business 32bit section but the multimedia keys where not the same they where before. Its a windows XP driver which buggs out every time the computer screen dims and the mute button light on the keyboard appears. Ive tried finding the vista/7 driver for it without any luck. Ive installed 3RVX the volume application. It works and rarly bugs out. Ive tried finding the old driver on the old hard drive with still no luck..

[patio]

Why would you continue to try and mount a failing HDD ? ?

As to your other issues your stating it's an XP PC that had at 1 time Vista Drivers and now it's running Win7...is that accurate ? ?

If so ...all bets are off.

[comda]

no. The computer had windows 7 when it the drive failed. And it had all the drivers. But the HP site only had up to windows Vista drivers which seem to work fine. But the driver for the HP media keys (so the top row/volume keys) and i tried to mount it to get the drivers. which i did through my macbook. But the Vista driver that i download for these keys turns out to be a XP driver because it bugs out and throws compatibility issues. This computer being originally licensed to XP when new is now and was before it crashed running 7 pro.

All other drivers are working.

[patio]

I'm thoroughly confused by that latest explanation...Sorry...

[comda]

Alright let me try and explain this in another way. The system when brand new was and still is licensed to windows XP pro.

When the 100Gb drive died it was then running windows 7 pro 32bit. My issue is the Hp drivers site. HP doesnt have a windows 7 section for drivers for this machine. It only has XP drivers and windows vista. So i used the vista section to download all my drivers and everything worked except for the Hp media buttons (the volume/mute/ displace brightness etc) Im stating it looks like HP made a mistake and placed a XP driver in the Vista section and therefore my Media keys dont work properly and the mute light keeps appearing. THe XP driver keeps telling me there are compatibility issues. 

That is why i was trying to mount the old drive. Because the old drive has the correct driver. But Just like when i got his data and again now it wouldnt mount to windows. In windows it would ask to format the drive. So i ended up finding the driver on the old drive but it was the installed files. So simply all the dll. sys files. i dont really know what to do with it all.

[patio]

Bottom line is if it's an HP XP PC and they dont have Win7 drivers available then you're obviously gonna lose some funtionality on the PC if you insist on running Win7...

NOTE: You could try a clean install of 7 on the new HDD...then DLoad and install all Vista drivers from HP ....but no guarantees there as well...

[comda]

I understand that. BUt somehow who ever programmed it before me had the correct hp button software. and i have the files. Just dont know how to get windows to see them. I got the right ones from the bad drive.

[Calum]

comda, what driver package are you trying to install, is it sp38266?  I've had experience of HP messing up their driver downloads, I think I have an identical machine in the cupboard somewhere at work and if so, I'll see if I can dig it out and try what you're trying, see if we can work this out together.

Also, HP setup files by default extract to C:\swsetup, is there a swsetup directory on your old drive?  If so, try matching the spxxxxx numbers to driver packages, one may be what you're looking for and that folder should contain the files you need.