Old Hard Drive Help Needed: PATA Hard Drive Freezes When it Reaches the Windows Desktop (Windows ME)

[TS Lightner 269]

So, I have this old Windows Millennium Edition PC, and in the past few years when I've pulled it out from under the desk, the whole system will boot, but once it reaches the desktop screen, everything freezes.  Specifically though, it's the hard drive that's the problem, as I've tested it in another PC, and it still freezes, and when it hits the freeze point, it stops making the clanky read/write sounds.  It should also be noted, that it even freezes in Safe Mode.

If anyone has any info about this, it would be really appreciated, as I want to save this Hard Drive and the info on it (if you have a suggestion of copying the info off, that would be fine too, as I could just get another old PATA Hard Drive to put the info on).

 

Thanks!

-SP64

 

(Also posting this on Minecraft Forums)

[Techno Universal 2,575]

7 minutes ago, Superplay64 said:

So, I have this old Windows Millennium Edition PC, and in the past few years when I've pulled it out from under the desk, the whole system will boot, but once it reaches the desktop screen, everything freezes.  Specifically though, it's the hard drive that's the problem, as I've tested it in another PC, and it still freezes, and when it hits the freeze point, it stops making the clanky read/write sounds.  It should also be noted, that it even freezes in Safe Mode.

If anyone has any info about this, it would be really appreciated, as I want to save this Hard Drive and the info on it (if you have a suggestion of copying the info off, that would be fine too, as I could just get another old PATA Hard Drive to put the info on).

 

Thanks!

-SP64

 

(Also posting this on Minecraft Forums)

I'm very clever with things like this so I believe it's just somehow the desktop screen data on your drive was somehow rewritten in a way that it causes the read head to move around in a way that would cause a head crash. So the drive would detect that and shut itself off to prevent a head crash and to be honest if a head crash occurred it would break the whole hard drive as it's when the head scratches the disk and completely breaks the drive. You could cause a head crash if you shake around the drive too much while it's reading or writing data. I believe that's what the problem is as the drive would only shut down like that if it detected a potential threat for a head crash.

[TS Lightner 269]

@Techno Universal Hmm...so, are you saying it's a problem with the HDD itself, or the OS/System data?  And would there be any way to save the data on the drive?

[Techno Universal 2,575]

12 minutes ago, Superplay64 said:

@Techno Universal Hmm...so, are you saying it's a problem with the HDD itself, or the OS/System data?  And would there be any way to save the data on the drive?

It's pretty much become a problem with the drive itself as it's going to power down every time it attempts to read that section of data that it freezes on. Now you could fix it by putting the drive into  an external USB hard drive dock and formatting the drive or if you're careful you could recover most of the data on it but it probably will shut down if you try to access the folder that the miswritten file is in so I recommend not to open the Windows 32 folder as the file is probably in there and even if the computer tries to render it into the list of files in the folder it would also power down the drive. Anyways it's just the formation that a OS file is physically written on the drive. This isn't a problem with modern day drives because of improvements in how the drive controllers sort and organise the data on the different tracks of the disk. Now formatting the disk should fix it as it completely resets the data on the drive without even reading it so that would definitely fix the issue if it's just a file organisation problem.       

[TS Lightner 269]

@Techno Universal So, If I were to stick it into my Windows XP computer as a side HDD, (rather than the main OS disk), then I could in theory extract the personal files from the drive, then format it, and re-install Windows ME?

[Techno Universal 2,575]

18 minutes ago, Superplay64 said:

@Techno Universal So, If I were to stick it into my Windows XP computer as a side HDD, (rather than the main OS disk), then I could in theory extract the personal files from the drive, then format it, and re-install Windows ME?

Now that's exactly what should fix the issue! Now just make sure your XP computer reads the drive as a mass storage device so it identifies it in the same way as a USB stick or SD card. It's so your computer doesn't use any data on it for booting or so it doesn't modify anything on the drive as a part of the boot up process.  

[TS Lightner 269]

@Techno Universal Thank you! I'll be gone for the weekend, so I'll test it on Monday maybe.